I lie, I haven’t yet learned how to stop worrying, only how to better manage it. That’s also kinda a lie. lol. I have learned how to… I have learnt how much I truly adore a long title.
Jump back to last year July. I'm in Sweden visiting my partner Alexander, and we're at this book launch in a little bookstore. Before the tall handsome blonde discusses her new novel, this man in a suit and tie stands up and sings opera, his baritone-deep voice filling the space with slow, satisfyingly melancholic songs. Italian opera, in Stockholm and I’m dreaming of opera in Taipei. Right then, I knew – I want an opera singer at our next TPC reading. It gave me goosebumps, it was such a beautiful moment. The audience was silent. He could’ve been singing about manure and it still would’ve slapped.
I'm alread plotting, goosebumps still on my arms, I’m envisioning a night of real culture and creativity, something Taipei hasn't seen before: poetry, opera, piano, and who knows what else.
I forget about all this for a while but when I do remember again, the journey to find our opera singer becomes a story in itself. I reach out to the arts university's opera department, get quoted NT$6000 for 10 minutes (not including pianist or piano), try to negotiate but aim too low. Other leads either don't pan out or are still too expensive. Jonathan, Piera, and Jeremy remind me that if we're spending money, it should be on our poets. Alexander offers to sponsor the singer, but by then our top choice is booked.
I try to let the dream go. The mixed reviews don't help – some people scrunch up their noses and tell me they think nobody will want to listen to opera. its just not cool, others look confused or uninterested. But then, one day, months after losing our opera singer leads, Jonathan tells me to check out one of our poets' IG stories: "How's your hunt for the opera singer going? Toni's got some pipes on her." Turns out, Toni is a classically trained opera singer who hasn't sung publicly in years, never in Taiwan. When she posts a video of her practicing with her teacher, without knowing about my little dream that had been placed under a bushel, it sparks something big.
Toni says yes, she'll sing. And that feels like a little nod, a little affirmation that I'm on the right track, that I'm in alignment. One of our poets will sing opera at our reading. It’s pretty wild.
When it does all come together, it’s a pretty big production. We're talking 24 poets, 1 opera singer, 1 deejay, 1 video artist, 1 visual artist doing live paintings, 1 emcee, 1 experimental pianist, a venue that can hold 150+ people. We're printing stickers, designing posters, managing social media, doing a feature on each poet reading, each poet in the journal, each artist. We’re creating the lineup, co-ordinating with the venue, launching early bird tickets, managing the event page, answering queries, getting tripods and finding a cameraperson – it's snowballing.
And now here we are, the day of the event. I'm carrying bags of plants and cloth and chairs and books and lights to decorate. We're setting up, laying our the tables, people are arriving, it's getting busy, we're taking the candles off the tables and folding up the cloths, we’re pulling the tables out again because we need more chairs, and now there's not enough chairs, and still more people are arriving and now we're about to start...