From 1998 until 2006, my life revolved around OPERA SAN JOSÉ’s production and performance calendar. In the same way that older adults still feel the ghost of their school year and summer vacation benevolently haunting their calendar year, I still have a keen awareness of the old OSJ schedule and calendar like some sort of secular artistic calendar of Saint’s Feast Days. August, October, January, and March meant rehearsals and September, November, February, and April meant opera productions. June and July meant mostly free time with the odd smattering of coachings, costume fittings, outreach, and the Opera In The Park concert held in Los Gatos and then Willow Glen. May meant a surge of final school outreach throughout the month, the Operafest Fundraiser Galas on the second Friday and Saturday of the month, and by Memorial Day Weekend, the bulk of my OSJ duties dwindled to a trickle until ramping up again at the start of August. But before Memorial Day, from 2004 until the final year of my residency in 2006, the performances of my Let’s Make An Opera class took place on the Friday and Monday straddling the third weekend of the May.
Let’s Make an Opera (or LiMO as we called it) was an educational program sponsored by OPERA SAN JOSÉ’s Opera Education and Outreach department. All Principal Artists-In-Residence would go to a 5th-8th Grade class and help them create an original story that the students would then adapt into a libretto which would be set to the pre-existing opera music of the Teaching Artist’s choosing. Over the course of ten sessions, the students would design all technical aspects of the show. They would all be cast in roles or in the ensemble and each student would have a corresponding offstage duty. They would promote the performance and all this would culminate in a matinee assembly performance for their schoolmates, faculty, and staff, and then an evening performance for their friends and family. This would be accompanied by one of OSJ’s talented staff pianists.
By 2004 I had already directed two LMOs at Easterbrook Elementary in 2001 and 2002. I thoroughly enjoyed it and found I had a facility for it. But it was MARIAN SMITH’S 2004 7th Grade class at St Frances Cabrini School that made me fall in love with the LMO program and in-school teaching in general. These kids were so incredibly creative! One had recently seen “Waiting For Guffman,” so they proposed the show-within-a-show concept that told the tale of a plucky, underfunded opera company attempting to mount a production of Mozart’s “The Marriage of Fígaro” and all of the setbacks and hijinks that ensue.
These kids were so inventive and adventurous! I’ve carried the spirit of their artistic bravery with me in all my subsequent arts teaching. All those kids are in their mid-thirties now!
I went on to teach two more wonderful and creative LMO productions at St Frances—one called “Love At First I.M.” Which involved projections of instant message interactions and mistaken identity reminiscent of “The Shop Around the Corner” set to the music of Donizetti’s “Elixir of Love” and another called “The Twirling Twister of Terror” about a sentient Tornado that threatens to destroy the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas, all set to the music of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni.”
Every year since, I have done some sort of in-school opera or musical performance teaching. It slowly but luckily eclipsed my performing work and now I look back and find that, despite all my plans and best efforts, I’ve found myself in a career that I never could have intentionally sought out, but that fills my heart with joy and purpose.
I have no idea where the kids of that 2004 production are from Saint Frances Cabrini School, but not a month goes by that I don’t think about my time with them, and the fun we had, and smile.