La Traviatta

Does that sound like gibberish to you too? Well, it's not gibberish, it's Italian!

That was the name of the opera we saw Saturday night (self-take photo to be posted tomorrow). Seeing as how Grayson and I have never been to an opera before, he decided to bid on some tickets at a ZTA fundraiser he recently attended. The show was also playing at a theatre we have never been to in Shreveport which made it all the more appealing.

We'd been looking forward to our fancy opera date all month long, but on the day of the show we realized that we wouldn't be able to turn it into a "date night" like we used to do before going to the Bass Hall in Fort Worth. Grayson's church league softball team has practice every Saturday afternoon (which we forget about) so we simply adjusted and made the best of the evening by hitting up the Wendy's drive-through line in our "operaesque" attire. We were lucky that no ketchup or sweet-n-sour sauce ended up on any of our dry-clean only apparel. After a quick meal, we were off to Shreveport for a very entertaining evening.

Never having been to an opera before and being the semi-dork that I am, I printed off the synopsis of the story so we could read it beforehand. Knowing how easily we can both get confused and not knowing if there would be any English at all, I wanted to make sure I did everything to make this a wonderful and not frustrating evening. To our surprise there was an overhead screen that printed ALL of the words in English throughout the entire opera. This was our saving grace b/c I'm not sure Grayson could have comprehended the storyline going solely on the body language of the performers!

Minus getting a few "shhhes" from some hardcore opera attenders behind us, getting told that our heads were in the way and sitting through 3 hours of Italian song, I'd say we had a great time. It really was an enjoyable evening and probably something that we'll sign up for again. We're currently considering season tickets to "Broadway in Monroe" for next fall. Who knew how cultured we could become from branching out there and trying new things?