1. It’s the only place you can watch dying people sing.
2. It’s the only place you can watch singing people make love.
3. It’s the only place you can watch people making love and not get in trouble for watching.
4. It’s the only place you can watch other people watching people sing, make love, and die -- without their minding that you’re watching them watch.
5. You can wear fancy clothes if you like and people think it’s O.K.
6. You can even wear jeans and a sweatshirt if you like, and people will think you’re eccentric, or maybe even intelligent.
7. If you like lavish scenery, it’s at the opera.
8. If you like big, fluffy costumes with lots of jewelry, they’re there.
9. If the sound of a symphony orchestra playing the world’s best-loved tunes thrills you, you can hear it at the opera.
10. If you like exciting singing -- high sopranos, deep basses, big choruses -- there’ll be some of that, too.
11. Opera has the longest history of any of the performing musical arts and...
12. ... it’s not any more difficult to understand than, say, West Side Story or Les Miz or Miss Saigon.
13. The story line of Miss Saigon is taken from an opera plot, anyway.
14. Every great community supports its arts organizations -- a drama company, a symphony orchestra, a theater company, an art museum, and an opera company -- and you should be a part of this support group, too.

15. If you’re afraid you won’t understand what’s going on, most companies (including Atlanta Opera) nowadays run a simultaneous translation on a screen right above the stage. They call these translations “supertitles,” because you can read them by a very slight nod of the head upwards, not just because they’re great little titles.
16. No commercial breaks.
17. It’s more cultural than boxing, and the outcome is more certain than a hockey game ...
18. ... and fewer people wear face guards.
19. Every great composer has written at least one opera, and you owe it to the geniuses of the past to acknowledge this fact at least once.
20. Some operas have a lot of dancing.
21. Some even have acrobats.
22. One even has live horses on the stage.
23. In the early days of opera, singers acting like gods and goddesses came down from the heavens in little flying machines. Sometimes an opera character disappears though a trap door in the floor of the stage. And all, the time, they keep on singing...
24. ... which provides excellent material for you if you’re dummy in a bridge hand.
25. Opera can lift the soul out of the day-to-day grind of life and, with the combined wonders of orchestral music, great drama, stage spectacle, vocal singing, and imaginative lighting, it’s one of the greatest 5-for-1 combinations invented in the last four hundred years.

---WFS
for Creative Loafing, August 1991