Making A Plan Poem by gershon hepner

Life is what happens while making a plan
to do other things, and a lump in your throat
occurs when you filter regret that you can
not expect that you’ll ever reach any high note.

Life functions best when emotion is highest,
and even if you’ve got a goal you can’t reach
allow all your aims with some hope to be biased,
and dare when you plan and are offered a peach.


“Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans, ” said John Lennon. This is quoted at the beginning of an article on Patricia Racette by Matthew Gurewitsch in the NYT. November 15,2009 (“A Soprano’s Hat Trick: Puccini Triple Bill”) :
LIFE is what happens while we are making other plans. Growing up in blue-collar Bedford, N.H., Patricia Racette sang jazz and played guitar, and when someone asked her to join the choir, her answer was “No, I sing alone.” Then she joined anyway, as a second alto. Not long after, her parents, older sister and younger brother piled onto a Greyhound bus to see Pat safely to North Texas State University (now the University of North Texas) in Denton, where she meant to study jazz. “I was paying my own way, and the school was affordable, ” Ms. Racette,44, said recently in the cathedral lobby of her Trump Place home in Manhattan. “I wept like a baby when my family said goodbye. But I completely blossomed there.” There were more tears when teachers started pushing her toward classical music, and another flood when she listened to Renata Scotto sing “Suor Angelica, ” Puccini’s wrenching tale of an unwed mother banished to a convent to whitewash her noble family’s honor. “I was lying on the floor of my apartment one night with the score, ” Ms. Racette said. “And at the end I was completely hooked.” As Ms. Racette was to learn, “Suor Angelica” is the centerpiece of Puccini’s triple bill “Il Trittico, ” which opens with the shocker “Il Tabarro” (“The Cloak”) and closes with the knockabout farce “Gianni Schicchi.” For the premiere in 1918, the Metropolitan Opera marshaled Geraldine Farrar, the company’s original Madama Butterfly and a reigning Tosca, as Suor Angelica; Claudia Muzio, another top Tosca, as the love-starved Giorgetta in “Il Tabarro”; and Florence Easton, whose repertory ranged from Carmen to Brünnhilde, as Loretta, the doting Gianni Schicchi’s ingénue daughter who winds him around her little finger with the Top 10 aria “O mio babbino caro.”
This was power casting on a grand scale, like fielding Maria Callas, Renata Tebaldi and Joan Sutherland on a single bill. Perhaps inevitably, sopranos eventually appeared who were hungry for all three parts: among them, Ms. Scotto, Catherine Malfitano, Teresa Stratas and Beverly Sills. Tebaldi tackled the complete triptych in the recording studio, as did Mirella Freni. In September, at the San Francisco Opera, Ms. Racette took up the challenge in a spare but effective production by James Robinson that originated at the New York City Opera. On Friday she steps into Jack O’Brien’s colossal staging at the Met. “I don’t think I’ve ever laughed more and told more jokes than when we were rehearsing ‘Suor Angelica, ’ ” she said, harking back to San Francisco. “But by the end of the performance I was bawling my eyes out.” Singing and crying at the same time: isn’t that supposed to be impossible? “When you get a lump in your throat, it’s because you’re filtering the emotion, fighting with it, ” Ms. Racette said. “I don’t do that.” Puccini won immortality by torturing his heroines, so much so that wary sopranos may regard his music as a drug: addictive and hazardous to their health in any but very controlled doses. Though Ms. Freni, for instance, portrayed Butterfly on a recording and on film, she gave the part wide berth in live performance, fearing the toll its anguish would take on her voice. Ms. Racette sees the matter differently. “What I say in big capital letters is: ‘Know thyself.’ I love portraying pain. Have I been locked in a convent and lost a child? No, but when I’m onstage, I feel exactly as if I had. My instrument functions best when the emotion is highest.”


11/21/09