by Lois Bender
Dare Devil
Curtain up
on the early nineteen fifties when the Metropolitan Opera’s backstage entrance was on
41st Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues.
Curtain up
on tonight’s performance of Puccini’s opera, Manon.
Curtain up
on a Parisian evening street scene where four tweens from the Metropolitan Opera’s
ballet school are performing as street urchins.
Curtain up
on that European tradition which gives young ballet students from a dance school
attached to an opera house a chance to perform. If they become professionals, the hope is the stage will feel like home.
Spotlight
on downstage right where three girls ogle a body builder lifting fake bar bells.
Spotlight
on how to make the street scene believable; the director has provided real food to be
passed around on tin trays.
Spotlight
on a shrimp-sized, serial thief stuffing ripe pear slices and rolled ham into her ochre-
colored costume’s pockets.
Curtain down
on the act. Jerome Hines, the Met’s star baritone, chases us offstage but our dancer’s
legs, swift as the messenger of the gods, carry us safely to the fifth floor dressing room.
Curtain down
again on Mr. Hines, whose basso profundo voice vibrates through the roof; You take the opera singers’ food again, I’ll have you fired.
Curtain down
on the four of us licking pear juice off our fingers while our eleven-year-old ringleader
lays down her juvy fingers swearing off stealing.
Curtain Call
on years later hearing the echo of Jerome Hines in Northern Greece. Camping with her then husband in a pup tent in an open field, she’s startled awake at four a.m. A stranger walks through the grass singing, his voice like a haunting from a bottomless well.
Jean Colonomos, award winning poet and playwright, cut her artistic teeth as a member of the Martha Graham Dance Company. Ms. Colonomos has published online and in many poetry journals. More about her can be found at https://jeancolonomos.weebly.com.
Lois Bender, a longtime New Yorker, combines her background in art direction and graphic design with personal expression in drawing, watercolor, photography, and printmaking creating a fresh synthesis of styles. Her art illustration brand GardenSpiritsNY Designs grew out of her Retail Gift Industry experience and her love of nature. Bender’s art practice has explored nature themes in gardens at residencies in France and The Hamptons, NY, as well as at Skowhegan and the Women’s Studio Workshop. With a B.A. from Hunter College, NY and an MFA from Boston University, she teaches art and watercolor techniques and exhibits her work in the Metro NY area. She is an Art Professor at Essex County College in Newark, NJ and has an art studio in Manhattan. She is an urban and garden sketcher who celebrates nature in all its poetic and ephemeral expressions. www.LoisBenderArt.com