a moment in the day: a romance

It's the first day of opera rehearsal for Madama Butterfly, and I sit in a chair on a riser on the practice stage wearing a white petticoat over my jeans. We're at a break in the action. The director is explaining something to a group of choristers off to my right while the rest of the actors scattered across the opera studio room relax on their marks and chat quietly.

Before me, in the area that would be downstage if the stage were more than just a floor, the stars of the show are half-sitting, half-lying, together. She is Cio-Cio San, a fifteen-year-old Japanese girl. He is US Naval Officer Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton, who has just leased a house in Nagasaki that comes with, among other things, Cio-Cio San as a wife.

Pinkerton thinks this marriage thing could be a bit of a lark. Cio-Cio San, on the other hand, is so smitten that she's given up her religion and become Christian in order to be faithful to him.

Tragedy, of course, is just around the corner. This is the opera, after all.

But in the meantime, Cio-Cio San and her BFF Pinkerton smile, lean back across the practice stage, taking a selfie with Pinkerton's phone.