My Operatic Life: Another Dream

I woke from a sad dream this morning. I was a supernumerary again, back at the Kennedy Center, playing a bit part in a big production, and it felt so warm and cozy to be back in that place again, back where I spent twenty years doing the underloved grunt work of being the guy in the background of a scene that adds up to operatic scale, and it felt good.

Because dreams are often stupid and mean, I was playing a dragon in one of those awful Shen Yun spectacles attended by uninformed Americans who don't mind supporting a wildly far-right propaganda machine tied to a religion that does to taoism what Westside Baptist does to the Christian Beatitudes (look it up), but somehow I was there, in my stage black, under the dragon costume, making it work. The old muscle memory still worked, the old twitch in the nerves when the cues came, and I set acres of silk billowing on script in a spectacle to delight the audience.

I woke up and it reminded me how those opera years were the thing that finally bridged the gaps between me and my dad, after his failed attempts to get me into something that moved him, from baseball to boy scouts to rebuilding an old car, and how, in a stroke of a Sharpie®, the rampaging jaundiced human shitstain-in-chief destroyed something so rich with the wealth of art and human endeavor, and not just another factory made plaster ornament gilded into fake opulence with a hair-thin layer of gold foil.

I hate what we live with now, and the ruination brought to us a by a horde of rampaging savages who've never known art or true beauty.

And still, a bit of the feeling of being home made it through, back when, even while in school full-time, with a full-time job on top, and a part-time job failing to fill the gaps in my budget, I managed to regularly make the time to do a labor-intensive thing that produced no profit for me, and yet which left me richer in life than money ever could have.

It's still out there, but not where I used to find it.

I was a dragon once before, right at the opening of The Magic Flute, this time at the nearby Wolftrap Filene Center, and it was more athletic than artisanal, with me under a huge sculptured framework of metal and painted canvas, with hot, sweaty foam rubber legs on the only part of me you could see from the audience, and it was a short bit, right at the start, where I'd emerge, stomping and triggering the jets of fire-extinguisher vapor to snort from the nostrils and gaping maw of the costume, then be chased and "slain" in the grand tradition, flop over onto my side, halfway offstage, and be discreetly dragged out of the costume from the wings by stagehands.

When I was in the mood, I could lumber to the dressing rooms in my clumsy dragon legs, get out of gear, put on pants, and sneak into the audience area to watch the rest of the opera for free. When I was feeling cheeky and found an empty seat, I'd very occasionally lean into a bewildered patron and whisper "that's me down there," pointing at the flopped-over dragon costume I'd just been dragged out of and having a moment of the odd pride of sort of watching myself act out a part. Most shrugged, but that's okay. You had to know.

It was the smallest part I had in twenty years of opera, with the longest commute to rehearsals, but it stayed with me, and seems particularly relevant lately, when the possibility of ever going back to that joyous moment gets more remote by the year, even if I know in my core that the dragon is still here, along with all my other roles, but this time, it's in me and not the other way round.

Watch me sometimes, just being resolutely ordinary in the face of unpleasant changes in the world, and see if maybe you see a little curl of fire extinguisher vapor in the air as I speak, or that maybe that dragon found an empty seat in the theater after rushing out to sit in the audience and leaned in to a bewildered fellow dragon to whisper, "that's me down there."

I yawn, I stretch, the dream wavers and starts to drift out of memory, the day is flickering into itself like an old fluorescent bathroom light fixture, and I have chores to do.

That's me down there.

©2026 Joe Belknap Wall