I’ve been to the opera. It was the shizzle. We sat right up front, close enough to see everyone in the orchestra sawing away in the pit. If you’ve never been, it’s pretty loud. Loud as a big band orchestra, or a rock band in a high school gym if they have hand-me-down amplifiers. All the actors are wearing these awesome costumes, and they make these big, sweeping gestures while they sing. When four of five of them start singing at the same time, it’s like a freight train coming. Awesome.

My honey wore this red dress. Low-cut, but elegant. She looked like a thousand second dates distilled into one sexy package. All the women were dressed like that. The men wore jackets and ties at a minimum. They held the doors for their dates.

There were dozens of highly accomplished musicians, and a hearty handful of singers, and who knows how many other people behind the curtain making the whole thing run. We sat in rapt attention and watched with a kind of awe as one of the most familiar and important pieces of music ever written blasted over our heads into a gilded theater filled with hundreds.

And with all that, the little printed program we were handed when we walked in was one percent as pretentious and self-aggrandizing as the opening credits for a YouTube video of a guy riding a bicycle around a park.