My friend Lisa had given Leslie and me her subscription tickets to two operas, Madame Butterfly and Carmen – she couldn’t go to the first and had seen the latter too many times for her taste. We went mostly out of curiosity. I thought opera might be too long and boring. Madame Butterfly, which we saw first, didn’t impress me much, though I liked a few of the arias. But then we saw Carmen, and that was the beginning of a new chapter in my life – one that reverberates to this day.
The particular date we saw the opera was October 20, 1991. I remember it because another tragedy was happening across the bay. At intermission, we stepped out on the balcony and saw the hills burning. It was the start of the Oakland firestorm – the worst urban fire in California history. I didn’t connect the opera and the fire in my mind, except that it forever anchored the day to tragedy.
I liked the whole opera – it had lots of familiar tunes, which helped – but it was that final confrontation between Don José and Carmen that landed the punch. He begs her to come back to him. She says no. He threatens her. She asserts that she will live or die a free woman. And then he kills her. It was completely gripping – see for yourself:
That wasn’t some abstract 19th-century melodrama. It was heartbreakingly familiar. A man who decides, “If I can’t have her, no one can.” Carmen is a woman who knows she’s risking her life, but values her freedom more than safety. She’s not suicidal. She just won’t lie to survive. I thought she was a bit nuts and a bit mean, but I admired her at the same time. While this version was fictional, the fact of femicide throughout the world was – and remains – quite real. Globally, about 38% of female homicides are committed by male intimate partners, according to the World Health Organization.
There’s a fascinating paradox within the whole opera. Carmen believes in fate, but that belief removes fear and sets her free. If death is coming anyway, the world is completely open to her. Fate becomes a permission slip.
Even though I am nothing like Carmen, I did identify with her. I’ve always been a risk taker. People have warned me all my life – as a woman – about how to be safe, how to live carefully. I have generally ignored them. I trusted my gut. I’m 70 now, so I know the risks worked out. But even if they hadn’t, I still think I’d rather be more Carmen-like than not. And since I don’t believe in fate, I think my bravery is more real than hers!
I bought the recording and planned to listen to the whole thing on LSD.
I was super excited. I knew it wouldn’t be too long or boring – no chance. From experience, I knew acid always led to intense feeling. And I had just discovered that opera could pull me deep into the emotional world of its characters. So I thought: what would it be like to combine the two – to let one amplify the other – especially in that final scene?
And, as I suspected, I was blown away.
That afternoon was the most intense experience of my life – at least up to that point.
The LSD didn’t just enhance the music – it made it feel like I was experiencing the drama myself. I wasn’t watching a character on a stage anymore. What the opera – and the acid – gave me was just enormous empathy. Not just for Carmen, but for every woman who had been there. Who had died there. The story was tragic, but the tragedy wasn’t abstract. I had become a super-empath.
It wasn’t a conversion moment. It wasn’t religious. But it was the beginning of something – the first time I understood that music, especially opera (with a little help from its friend), could help me untangle the human condition and my place in it. It could be instructive – not in a preachy way, but in a way that demanded moral and emotional engagement.
Basically, with this experience, I found the method for my moral journey. And yeah, later – much later – we’ll get to Judaism.
But more opera and LSD to come...
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