Thursday, March 20, 2008

Kulture Klash

So, in an effort to become more "cultured", Matt and I have been to 2 different cultural events at the Kennedy Center this month. But here's the thing...we are very cheap. Of course, those of you who know me are probably thinking, "Laura, you drop $100 at Target on a monthly basis." Which is true. I can't deny that. I love Target. But I also want to be more cultured, so I've been on the lookout for good deals.

Before this month, the last time we went to the Kennedy Center was sometime in college, probably over a decade ago. Matt surprised me on Valentine's Day with an Italian dinner served in his dormroom and then with tickets to a jazz concert at the Kennedy Center. Or so he tells me. I remember the pasta. I don't remember the concert.

A couple of weeks ago, I was flipping through one of the free newspapers and come across this special discount for $20 tickets to the National Symphony Orchestra. Great! We got our tickets, enjoyed the concert, and ran into a friend on a date during intermission. We crashed their date (at his invitation), and told them that the last symphony we had attended was the NSO performing classical music from Bugs Bunny cartoons (which was awesome, by the way). We also mentioned that we had been wanting to go to the opera, since we had never been.

Well, less than a week later, I find half price opera tickets! Apparently, Wagner's the Flying Dutchman is in town. So off we go, back to the Kennedy Center tonight, where we go to sit through a 2 hour opera with no intermission.

It was...interesting. The music was good, the singing was good, the story was interesting, but man, the dialogue was terrible. I'm sure part of that was the fact that we were reading English supertitles and they were singing in German, but after a while you just kind of want it to be over with. I was slightly relieved when the main female character finally threw herself off a cliff.

I guess I will never be a fancy Laura, wearing opera gloves and a monocle. I still prefer my concerts in the outdoors in the summertime. And I think I like my operas with an intermission.