An awards reception was held at the newly retrofit Veterans Building's Green Room on Thursday evening, honoring American soprano Patricia Racette with the Merola Distinguished Alumni Award. (Pictured above left to right are former Merola president and current Board member Donna Blacker, Racette, and Merola Executive Director Jean Kellogg.)
The Merola program is an independent adjunct of the San Francisco Opera, which runs an annual summer training boot camp in San Francisco for young opera singers who are aspiring to turn professional. The three dozen or so singers and coaches and directors from around the world are given a stipend rather than having to pay for the experience, and are usually housed at the homes of Merola donors, many of whom were in attendance on Thursday.
Patricia Racette was in the program in 1988, when through a series of fateful accidents, she ended up on a tour with Merola's Western Opera Theater singing the demanding title role of Madama Butterfly way before she probably should have been. She then graduated to the main stage of the SF Opera as an Adler fellow, playing small roles like the Celestial Voice in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake Aida and the Fifth Maidservant in Elektra with Gwyneth Jones before forging a great international career of her own.
I was transformed from a Racette admirer to a full-fledged worshiper after appearing onstage as a supernumerary in a 2007 production of Madama Butterfly in the old Ron Daniels production with Brandon Jovanovich making his SF Opera debut as Pinkerton. I don't even like Madama Butterfly but the performance was so moving that some of us were relieved to have black veils over our faces as Kabuki kurokos because we were crying.
Racette is also smart, funny, and clear-eyed about her art. Her speech to the Merola donors and former colleagues about the program was gracious, as she noted how outrageously naive and green she was when they all first met. "You turned what was a hobby into a profession. Thank you from the bottom of my heart." Racette just performed in a new production of Shostakovich's wild Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk at London's English National Opera, where she got raves from the critics. It would be great to hear her in the same role at the San Francisco Opera.
Instead of Star Wars, we perversely went to two very good muckraking films this Christmas season, Spotlight and The Big Short, which were based on true stories about institutional corruption. Spotlight examines the 2002, deeply-researched series the Boston Globe newspaper published about pedophile priests in the Catholic Church and how they have been shielded over the decades not only by the Church itself, but by the legal establishment including judges, prosecutors, defense lawyers, and police, along with the press itself. The film is somber and beautifully written, and all the actors from Michael Keaton to Rachel McAdams to Mark Ruffalo turn in performances that are simultaneously underplayed and brilliant. When not totally infuriating, the film is also hopeful, demonstrating that information properly broadcast can effectively change things for the better.
No such hope is offered in the antic, cartoon-style The Big Short, which untangles the 2008 mortgage meltdown on Wall Street through the stories of four groups who bet against the deceptive chicanery that was the 2001-2008 housing bubble. Once again, the swindle was widespread, with federal government agencies not doing their jobs, Wall Street ratings agencies like Moody's becoming rubber stamps for worthless subprime mortgages, and an army of real estate agents and mortgage bankers dispensing with ethics altogether while riding the wave until it crashed and destroyed the savings and livelihoods of millions. Most depressing is that the financial industry's behavior continues unabated and unpunished, and we're heading for another cliff where the taxpayers will be required to bail out the banking criminals yet again.
The photos above were taken at a Muni bus stop at 18th and Castro yesterday, where a gentleman repeatedly ran into a store to buy scratch-off Lotto tickets and then used the movie ad kiosk as a backstop. The ironies are so numerous I don't know where to begin.
A sculpture trumpeting the 50th Super Bowl has gone up in Civic Center. It is at the long end of the sandy waste which used to be a lawn before Mayor Gavin Newsom had it torn out in 2008 for a bogus Victory Garden for Chez Panisse's Alice Waters.
Mayor Ed Lee's administration has been coming up with similarly misguided ideas in anticipation of Super Bowl 50 (the NFL ditched the Roman numerals this year) to be played February 7th at the new Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara. Lee clumsily announced last August that the homeless "are going to have to leave San Francisco" for two weeks, and there was also a plan to tear down all the overhead Muni wires on Market Street leading to the Embarcadero so the proposed Super Bowl Entertainment Village would be more aesthetically pleasing. Thankfully, that multimillion dollar fiasco was averted when public outcry was strong and immediate.
The last time the Super Bowl was played in the Bay Area was Version XIX in 1985. It was held at Stanford Stadium because the NFL considered Candlestick Park too much of a shithole to host the high rollers. At least the game was good, with the San Francisco 49ers led by coach Bill Walsh and quarterback Joe Montana winning their second Super Bowl together over the Miami Dolphins of the Don Shula/Dan Marino era.
Currently, the 49ers have an idiot owner who recently fired an eccentric, winning coach who was doing amusing things with a charismatic backup quarterback, and the present team is woeful. They also moved out of town to a cursed stadium next to San Jose, which has not particularly endeared them to longstanding San Franciscans. Like Cassandra, I am feeling imminent disaster here, with the recent America's Cup mess as a template. If most of the weather forecasters are correct, February 7th should be smack in the middle of the El Niño storms which are expected to wallop us soon. This could be interesting.
