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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