Opera and Oxytocin

On Saturday, we drove an hour away to the Opera Theater in Weston to see "The Little Prince." We took a friend's five-year-old son and another friend came with her six-year-old daughter. Distance and time are on a different scale here. Vermonters think nothing of driving an hour or more to see a play or have dinner with friends or go for a hike or snow-shoe, and so on.

We drove on dark, windy roads passing villages with nothing in them but a post office, a gas station or maybe nothing other than a small sign with the village's name. The ski-resort towns have more going on: casual and upscale restaurants, some shops, places to buy ski equipment. The amount of farmland, woods, open pasture in this state is always a pleasure to discover and rediscover. Weston is a quaint town with the original Vermont Country Store (known for their old-timey, and often expensive, merchandise and large mail-order business, but our five-year old friend fondly recalled the penny candy counter and a bow and arrow set he got there once) and a small village green with the opera house--a grand white building with Greek columns--right in the center of it. All of us struggled to follow the plot of the children's opera, after all, all the lyrics were entirely sung, but the voices were good, the costumes well-made and the orchestra was particularly talented. Our little friend was bored much of the time and kept asking if it was going to be over soon. I understood his sentiment exactly. We assuaged him, a bit, with a brownie and hot chocolate. He perked up when four hunters, trying to catch the fox, came on stage. I perked up when I saw the woman, a soprano, with a terrific sparkly blue costume, representing the water drawn up from the well that the Little Prince and the Pilot find in the desert. She really sounded, to me, like the personification of water and her lovely, haunting song didn't have any lyrics.

This afternoon, after an opening at the local museum, we went to another musical performance to hear an original score composed by our neighbor, Paul Dedell. It too had lyrics sung by an opera singer, a tenor, and also a choir--both children and adult--and musicians, mostly percussionists. I found it to be a very ambitious piece, particularly because Paul combined poems and prose about love with language from studies about the science of love. This meant that at one point the children were actually singing "Oxytocin! Oxytocin!" This is the drug found in parents tending their children and also in the children who are being tended (but not in emotionally abandoned children who grew up in Romanian orphanages--hence the chemical, biological reason these children struggle to feel attached to even the most loving adoptive parents later on).

His wife was the conductor and both got a rousing, standing ovation from the large audience. It was a show of support for this couple and their contributions to the music community as much as it was for the performance and music itself. The warm reception and affection toward the Dedell's was another hallmark of living in a community such as this one.