Prelude to the Performance, published in Under the Gum Tree in 2015

March 1991

I insert my fare card and two wings open wide enough for me to pass through Farragut West station towards the Kennedy Center. Gleaming in the silver dress my grandmother found at the Jewish women’s resale store and forty-five minutes away from my fifteenth opera, I am ready: I have listened to Puccini’s Tosca three times with the libretto in hand and dreamt for a full week of the myriad ways the director might stage Tosca jumping off a building to her death. Having not yet received walking lessons in heels, I clack and thud at each step on the rust-tiled concrete until reaching the escalator that carries me towards dusk and my mother. 

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