It’s all Verdi’s fault

Notice how it has become the rage to publicly talk about one’s failures, phobias, fears, neurosis, psychosis, sexual preferences, addictions, crimes – the Penal Code kind, and even… plastic surgeries. People in the entertainment industry can assure their popularity mushrooms and their revenues skyrocket with news of their miserable childhoods, their heretofore unspeakable misdeeds, and ultimately their triumphs. I suppose adoring fans reason, “Hey, she, he, agender, bigender, etc.” is just like us.

This takes me to the judiciary. I think that’s an ok opening sentence for this paragraph. But if you disagree, please disregard the first sentence of this second paragraph. Ostensibly I wrote it, or maybe A.I. did. Sorry, but I am compelled to digress, an annoying trait that any decent writer should avoid. Regular readers of this column (an accurate account unattainable; who would make such an admission?) know of my obsession with A.I. It threatens to invade the law. And we must be vigilant to assure it does not write legal briefs, judicial opinions, and “God forbid!” columns. Please note the preceding reference to God is not meant to connote religious beliefs in any denomination and is not meant to promote, sanction, influence, or in any way imaginable, insult any person living or dead who may hold or reject beliefs in any God or any concept of a superior being. If any sentient being, A.I., or any manifestation of a so-called non-human entity is or could be offended by the foregoing comments, I deeply apologize and will be attentive in the use of my language.

And as I theorized in a prior column, maybe A.I. created us, yes, us humans. Don’t scoff. We “humans” know so little. There are people who today believe the earth is flat and there are organizations whose membership espouse this hypothesis. To the flat earth people, please see expiation in previous paragraph. (Ibid.) A friend allegedly read in an ancient text that creative thinkers mused that our entire universe could be encased in a drop of sweat on the testicle of a giant rat. I use the word “giant” solely as a human’s reference. But consider what I briefly theorized in a previous column, a daring postulation that has more intellectual heft than the theory espoused by the flat earth theorists: What if … stay with me on this … what if a much more advanced manifestation of what we call A.I., one that is incomprehensible to humans… created us? Here readers are allowed a moment to collect themselves. To traditional religious folk, and those religious folk who are less than, or anti-traditional, please see apology. (Ibid.)

To the counter argument advanced by the less imaginative that it is an empirical fact we invented A.I., I counter with the obvious retort, IT or “they,” our “A.I.” creator(s) is/are playing with us, having fun and games, letting us believe we have invented a monster. IT or they, (who knows?), has us believe the crude invention that copies and puts words together in a nanosecond is our creation. That we are worried about A.I. dominating us in the future, when it has been doing that from the beginning of time as we think we know time, could just be a joke our creator is playing on us.

Whoops, looks like I have strayed from my topic: people, celebrities, and even judges revealing their lives as real people with the same flaws, worries, and frustrations of common folk … I mean other people. In a recent edition of the National Center for State Courts, an amiable judge, I could tell from his photo and his piece, Mark D. Pfeiffer, Judge, Missouri Court of Appeals—Western District, talked about the past and the good times he had with his law partner and their sons. He seems like a nice guy, a judge, I might like to have as a colleague. I should read some of his opinions to make sure. I don’t mean this as a criticism of Judge Pfeiffer, but readers like to hear about a judge’s awkward moments, the screwups. Maybe that’s a California thing. So here are two awkward moments that occurred at the Music Center in Los Angeles. I could have been arrested.

Was it La Traviata? No matter. The program notes mentioned the passionate affair Verdi had with the incomparable soprano Giuseppina Strepponi. They eventually married. Only Verdi could get away with that in the 1840’s. I was so moved by the music and the couple’s illicit relationship that I composed a poem during the performance. The poem begins:

I

Guiseppina Strepponi

Loved Verdi and spumoni,

Was his lover, not a crony,

His muse, his rigatoni.

I read it to a lady who sat down next to me in the lounge during intermission and asked me how I liked the opera. She got up and left without saying a word. No doubt she deduced that I had penned my lines during an important aria. She did not stay to enjoy the second quatrain. I suppose that’s just as well because it employs a different meter.

II

She, Verdi’s love, his love only,

A love that’s true, not phony,

They, an island, not Coney,

They were ham and cheese, not baloney.

Verdi struck again with his lengthy opera, Simon Boccanegra. I could have been arrested. Simon Boccanegra is an unusually long opera. Is that why the geniuses at the Los Angeles Music Center decided to schedule just one intermission? Seems to me a long opera calls for two or maybe even three intermissions. So, we get home a little later. What’s the big deal? Between scenes, the theater lights faintly lit, and on the screen above the stage appeared the words that drove me to the edge of madness, “Not an Intermission.” Do I have to elaborate? It has to do with the bladder. I stuck it out for two non-intermissions. Desperation compelled me to fight my way along the row of seated opera goers who grumbled, “Not an intermission” as I stepped on their feet and grumbled back, “I can read.”

As I reached the door to the lobby, a young female usher partially blocked the door to the lobby and admonished, “Not an intermission.” As I hurried past her to push open the door, my hand brushed against her arm and she exclaimed, “You touched me!” Have you ever had a full bladder while experiencing terror at the same time? Flashing before my eyes were my arrest for assault and battery, the headline in the Daily Journal, the hearing resulting in my …. Need I go on? But my dormant instincts from my trial lawyer days kicked in and I said, “I am sick. I must get out.” The usher panicked, forgot about the “assault,” and said, “Don’t worry, I will call 911.”

But I made up for these transgressions by rescuing a lady who out of desperation could no longer wait in line for the ladies’ room during intermission. She used the men’s restroom, and I engineered her escape. This masterful accomplishment I achieved so that we were undetected. I wrote about this in a column years ago. And I subsequently learned that the woman I rescued was the spouse of a superior court judge. Stay tuned for more serious screwups I may write about as I get closer to retirement.