Our trip to San Francisco was fabulous. More than chocolate, more than Pier 39, more even than clam chowder in sourdough bread was the pleasure of watching a stage performance of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera. Karen and I devoured a very early dinner of fresh shrimp on the waterfront and then raced back to our hotel to put on our version of the ritz, complete with high heels and make-up. We did a fast and barely sedate gallop down the street – literally, considering that most streets in SF slope perilously in various directions – and slid into our seats in the dress circle just in time for the last bell.
From then on it was, especially for me, bliss. I knew all the music, all the words, all the dialogue. It was almost as if we were sitting in a dive of a cinema hall in the heart of Mumbai, watching a Hindi masala movie, complete with songs, hamming and the odd tree around which the stars ran, with the audience (ie: me) chorusing every word that came over the tinny loudspeakers. I squeaked when the chandelier crashed down, laughed hilariously when the diva’s voice frog-croaked, sighed when Raoul, Vicomte de Chagny sang a duet with his love, Christine, while the Phantom languished alone in the cellars, and then wept a tiny, surreptitious tear when he came to an unfortunate end. I sang along with Music of the night, spoke as Firmin did and enjoyed every second of the lavish production. Karen, finally dragging me out into the cool late evening after the final encore, grinned happily – it was rare for me to show such uninhibited enthusiasm in public.
The euphoria didn’t end there. We proceeded on a hopping tour of the art galleries that punctuated the main road leading to our hotel, and chatted up all sorts of interesting people, meeting their significant others, business partners and assorted pets en route. I got my first sniff from a ferret, a lovely lithe brown little creature that explored everything about me, from the bow on my sandals to the silver bells in my chignon, all with an endearing and childlike curiosity. I was offered a sip of mate, searingly hot and oddly refreshing, from a steaming silver cup-and-straw contraption. And I fell totally and utterly in love with the work of an artist called Missy Dizick, whose cartoon-ish cats chortled and chuckled with feline delight as they gazed upwards, gambolled in the grass and lay stretched in postures only a cat can achieve. Please, please, please, sell me that one, I begged the gallery owner, I really want it! It was taken, and the poor lady, wanting to please and not able to do so, did her best to make me happy with a poster of Dizick’s charming cats gazing at the moon.
We did get down to the real business of being tourists, but only the next day. Booking ourselves on to a tour bus, we saw what we were supposed to, bought the prescribed ration of ticky-tacky tourist junk and had fun making candles, tasting olives and gaping at the exotica of food shops in Chinatown. And, yes, we did finally see The Bridge. It was from a ferry that chugged around the bay, with Karen and I clutching cameras, skirts and hair as our teeth chattered in perfect rhythm and our fingernails went blue with cold. The huge structure arched and swayed above our heads as we sailed under it, feeling like we were leaving California through the gate – the Golden Gate.
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