after a tough night...

found a web site that was presenting a full version of the opera Street Scene, by Kurt Weill (he wrote the music, lyrics by Langston Hughes and Elmer Rice, whose original play Street Scene the opera was adopted from). I have always loved this opera, with many musical comedy aspects. Got to about the end if the first quarter of the first act when I turned to the blog.
  I remember the first time I saw the opera, it was part of an all American Spring season at City Opera, then performing at the New York City Center, with its two balconies. I had a second balcony seat. I was a junior at Bronx Science, we had just moved from the "old building" on 183rd and Creston, to the "new building" about a mile north and a little west. I was infatuated with the student who was placed next to me in English, her name was Judy---we spoke a lot during class---I thought we had a real bond. She lived on 79th street and Broadway (about 3 blocks from where I live now) but which then, as a callow kid living in the Bronx, seemed so exciting to me. Many of my fellow Juniors from Bronx Science lived in Manhattan--to me so different from where I lived in the Bronx, I longed to understand just what their life was like. Judy and I "grooved" well, until she was moved again, when the tables in the English class were changed. Was I 'shattered"? No, I thought we would have some kind of a romantic life after school. That summer, I went to camp at Bard college, but my thoughts were only on returning to Science in September and finding her. We were in the same English class (journalism) so I would definitely see her again. But somehow there was a gap between my longing and her perception of me. There would be no relationship, no romance---hard for me to accept. Yet she told me very plainly that I was not for her. I could deal with that---but---finally one Monday, I walked with her to the subway, next to her best friend Susan and Susan's boyfriend, Eddie.
Just walking with her that short distance, somehow made me feel more important, alive.
  Why, I wondered, if the content was so meaningful and vital, could that not turn into a full fledged romance?
   There is a postscript to this story---I think I have written it in one of my other blog entries. In 1979 I am "hanging out" in a west side neighborhood bookstore. A woman my age stopped me and asked if I remembered her. It was Judy, very friendly, not remembering our content or her rejection of me, but anxious to talk at the moment. She told me she lived in Canada  with her husband---as we spoke I tried to act "normal" but in my mind, the passion I had felt for her, was reviving. Nothing happened--
she left, and I was left to put the whole thing together. I think I was amazed that it was she who stopped me.
  As for the opera---well, I loved it. I remember William Chapman as the vicious husband, Frank Poretta as the "tenor hero" and Sandra Lee who had a short but very funny dance number with
Richard Tone. I could not get enough of it--I returned to see it that fall when the opera company revived it again. Great music, amazing characters---great passion. It was good to hear some of it
again this morning.