Day 15 Tuesday 5/31

8:09 Wake up
9:05 leave the house to drive into the city, Kimmer, Carolyn, Annabel, and Carolyn’s mom are going, Victoria stays home to do senior program stuff.
10:05 we park
10:15 we meet the opera people we’d gone into the city to meet. My mom arranged a tour-ish thing for us with some of the people she knows at the opera, so we could see everything that goes on behind the show.
10:30 First stop: Costume Shop. This was really cool. We met up with a guy named Christopher who I think is the assistant head costume designer or something and he first took us through a couple of rooms filled with all the different kinds of costumes they have (which is a LOT of costumes) and then took us up to the workshop area and pointed out the different kind of “stations”. He then showed us the different costume designs for all four cycles of Wagner’s Ring Cycle which is what they are preparing for right now (Carolyn and Sharon are going to see the whole cycle in June, there are four different operas: Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung. Gotterdammerung was the main focus of our visit, because they’re opening just that piece of the cycle this Sunday. It was especially interesting to see it all because operas rarely put on the whole Ring Cycle because it is so long, there are actually people who travel all over the world watching Ring cycles. Gotterdammerung is over 5 hours long). Anyway, it was very interesting to see the different costumes and to talk about them. He gave us each a little book with the sketch designs of the various costumes and talked about the choices that were made for the costumes, including fabric and color, for example the woman who is one of the main causes of Siegfried’s death wears a dress the same color as the hunters who kill him, by the end of the show Brunnhilde’s wedding dress changes somber (doesn’t want to get married) silvers and whites to darker dirtier grays to show how she has been affected by everything. Then he took us to one of their spray rooms, where they spray paint whole outfits, then the room where they dye the cloth and where the woman we talked to mixes paints to look like oil and mud and stuff and then the room where they make all the hats.
11:30 Then we left (I slipped out of my third person tense, oh well) the costume shop and went back to the opera building. Then another person took up to the highest level, about 10 stories up, where they have all the motors which run the pulls that the set hangs off of and showed us how all of that stuff works. Then we went backstage, which is HUGE in that building because they need so much room for all their stuff. It’s really cool to see.
12:15 we went to lunch at a French restaurant called Absinthe which was very good, and no we didn’t drink any Absinthe.. of course.
2:00 we met back up with the opera people and went to watch the dress rehearsal. They gave us headsets so we could hear all the different stuff the director was saying, like the commands for the different effects and projection changes. We went backstage for a bit and watched them do a 1:27 second scene change, it was funny to see the guys taking all the big rocks and throwing them off the stage to each other and just very interesting in general. It was also really cool to watch the singers from backstage. Then we went back to our seats to watch it normally. Then after awhile we went down under the stage and saw the fog machines, went back up and watched, then went up to the light booths then back to watch.
5:30 rehearsal break for dinner, we left.
6:20 we go to the store, then come home and have crab cakes from whole foods and salad for dinner. It was a really fun day.