Thursday, November 4, 2010

Old Age Day by Day November 4, 2010

We are going to the opera Saturday to see Cyrano, with Placido Domingo. I've seen him before, and he's magnetic and has a gorgeous voice. It may not be the same now he's in his seventies, but he gets all my empathy. I actually love the story so much. I was a great one for Hugo and Dumas and the romantic French melodramas as a teenager, and I adore Cyrano. I identified with him completely. I, too, felt not conventionally pretty enough to attract the beautiful people, despite being funny and smart. I knew early on looks got you farther. And I had the fatal irony Cyrano represents: I was as superficial as the people I ridiculed, for I was attracted to the gorgeous ones as well. The silent guy with knockout eyes. I imagined him with depths of feeling and smoldering intelligence. Probably he had nothing interesting to say. So here were a bunch of us having crushes on others, and we should have turned to each other and taken a good look, a long look, but we were part of the culture. At about seventeen, I started to get it - that probably some pretty interesting guys were hiding behind acne. I began talking to one in chorus, and he was funny and satiric and opinionated about everything. I was, too. I asked him to the holiday dance at school, and we went steady for the spring semester. By the time I left for college, even handsome guys somehow liked me, and I had my pick. Something had changed. Probably the glasses replaced by contact lenses, growing out my thick black hair, the clothing styles, and definitely mascara played a role. So my ugly duckling days were mostly over, and though there was always a sense that a gorgeous guy wouldn't probably want me on his arm, I now knew that narcissism was boring to be around.

Cyrano is a glorious story, but it's a story about adolescence, and clinging to beauty over substance. Cyrano's passion was for a shadow, without substance. That is his lesson to us. Roxanne is vain and not worth the effort.

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