In Which I See a Drag Show and Das Rheingold in 24 Hours

My story starts, where many good stories start, in a parking lot at 9:30 Friday night. One of my friends, A certain Kalila Z, was born twenty years ago this Friday, and in honor a large group of cool people were planning to go to a gay bar in Dayton. Never fear, there was no underage drinking involved: they let people under 21 in, but first they must receive the Black Spot on their hand that marks them as forever dead to all bartenders. But that wasn't such a big deal. Any homophobes who might be reading this: you're missing out. This place was one of the best places I have been since Germany. Good music, more flashing lights than the NYPD, and plenty of space to dance.

But, the real reason we were there was the drag show. I didn't really know what to expect: I had the usual stereotypical image of drag queens: sarcastic, flamboyant, and wearing enough makeup to cover a small zoo of test animals. But I didn't really expect the stereotype to be fulfilled. It was, and then some! The Mistress of Ceremonies, who between dance routines called up those with birthdays, looked like Miss Piggy, talked like a chain smoker, and sparkled like a fiber optic Christmas tree. It was pretty awesome, and sure worth the trip.

Back from that, I was dozing comfortably at 11:00, when my cell phone started vibrating. It was a call from my section leader, asking me where I was and if I wanted to go to Das Rheingold. I had completely forgotten that I was planning to go see that this afternoon! Hastily, I grabbed the nearest pieces of clothing and dashed out the door and across campus to drive back to Dayton. The location of the production was the New York Metropolitan Opera, but a movie theater in Dayton was screening it live in HD on the big screen. It was great: sure, it wasn't truly live, but opera houses tend to frown on eating popcorn during the show.

And Wagner is truly fascinating: For those unfamiliar with the work and unwilling to sit through an uninterrupted three hours of melodramatic German, the plot is as follows:

A German god has a midlife crisis, and takes out a mortgage to build Valhalla, his dream house. But he can't make the payments, and the Giants Repo Men come, and take his daughter as collateral. Meanwhile, a jew gnome steals some gold from three mermaids, and renouncing all love, forges it into The One Ring. He then uses the ring's power to force his fellow jews gnomes to make and hoard gold for him, planing to use it to take over the world. But the portly god finds out about this, and storms down to the underworld, to steal the gold he needs to ransom his daughter back. he captures the jew gnome, and takes the ring along with the rest of the gold, but the jew gnome curses the ring, saying that whoever has it will be forever paranoid, and whoever doesn't will be forever envious. The middle-aged god, of course, poo-pooh's this, and would have kept the ring even at the price of his daughter, were it not for the words of a strange lady who shows up for no discernible reason to warn him against it. In the end, the Repo Giants leave with the cursed ring, and the family of gods is reunited in their happy home.

To be fair, the Met did their best to tone down the antisemitic undertones: Alberich, the gnome, was cast as a black man. However antisemitic Wagner may have been, though, the score and libretto are wonderful: I wasn't able to understand all the german, because there were a lot of archaic and just plain operatically mangled words. But I caught enough to hear the poetry in it. And the staging of this production was... well, check out this video and see for yourself:

All I could say was...wow. If you find yourself in a position to see this, either live or recorded, take it. It's a wonderful show.

The Best Laid Plans of Mice and College Students

I still don't know what to do with "David im Deutschland", now that David is no longer on exchange but instead a boring old college student. I feel so self-indulgent writing about myself now, now that my situation is shared by so many other people. Before I was given voice simply by the uniqueness of my situation: bad or good, I was charting a place that had not been explored. Now, my writing is leveled with the masses, open to comparison on its integral merits, and I doubt that comparison is a favorable one.

Not that the college experience suffers from a dearth of writing topics. On exchange, I comforted myself with the image of my return to the states as a worldly and experienced young man, far above such childish things as homesickness and peer pressure. I have never been more disillusioned. College is an entirely different experience from exchange. I arrived in Germany into the arms of a waiting support structure. I lived with families inside their preestablished web of routine and love. Here, there was no such network; instead there was a steaming broth of young adults, with barely preestablished mealtimes to lend order to the chaos. Germany was an exercise in forming connections, breaking routines to try to forge a place for oneself. College, it sometimes seems, is the exact opposite; the nemesis isn't boredom, but overstimulation, not wasted hours but overcommitment. And in this hot soup of people and events, it is even harder than before to make and maintain lasting connections. Some days I get back to my room, exhausted and realize that I did not have a single meaningful interaction with a person I care about.

Those are the worst days. But there are plenty of better ones. College, like exchange, concentrates awesome people. The criteria are different: Less emphasis on an outgoing personality, and more on smarts, obviously. But the effect is similar: the concentration of interesting people reaches a critical mass, where the actions of the group become non-deterministically awesome. Some weekends I party and some I watch nerdy TV and some I don't do anything in particular and it is all intensely fun. Come to think of it, the modifier "Intense" applies to pretty much everything that happens here. And that's intensely awesome.

Anyway, watch this space, I guess. If I have anything I want to write, it'll end up here.