Authors Electric

The other night I found myself in a crush of shoppers at a big-top market. Its cavernous space cheerfully illuminated: Murmurs blended into the ambient up-music amid a kaleidoscope of kiosks, redolent with e xotic victuals. I was bringing an order of barbecued prawns to my inamorata and a couple of friends who sat at a food court table chatting merrily. As I approached, someone informed me that I had dropped something. Shrimp were falling from the soggy bottom of my bag, one-by-one, leaving a trail behind me. Then the bag gave way and the rest plopped to the tiled floor in a slippery mess at my feet. There was a hush. People tried not to stare. No use attempting to salvage anything. I could just hear, “Clean-up on aisle 4,” over the loudspeakers. “ Tooozi again! Get that Toozi off the court!” I remembered my red-faced high school basketball coach blowing his whistle and yanking me out of practice games for passing the ball to opposing players. I grinned fe...

Giuseppe Verdi by Giovanni Boldini When I was five years old, my aunt Nina dressed me in a little blue suit and took me to a New England Conservatory of Music production of Giuseppe Verdi 's Rigoletto at Jordan Hall in Boston with my mother in the role of Gilda. Being as this was my first live opera, my aunt sat us unobtrusively in the last row of a side balcony, with an exit handy in case I didn't last. Before each act, she explained the story of the opera, based on a Victor Hugo play, as best she could in terms I could understand, censoring the racy parts about Duke of Mantua's womanizing. Just before the third act, she sketched out the tragic conclusion in which Gilda is murdered by an assassin – Sparafucile – who had been hired by her doting father, the hunchback jester Rigoletto himself, to kill the Duke. Gilda is stabbed by Sparafucile as she enters an inn by night trying to save the Duke, whom she loves despite his perfidiousness. As we settled into ou...