Listen, the Snow is Falling.

I have heard the Metropolitan Opera on the radio and I have seen opera live, but I have never seen the Metropolitan Opera live, though it is one of those things I have always wanted to do.

I paid a crazy amount of money ($15 a ticket) to take my kids to the movie theater at the University to see a live performance broadcast onto a movie screen. The opera was amazing - the singing and costumes and stage were just as beautiful as I imagined they could be. And when at the end of the opera, the camera scanned the audience, I felt the desire to be there in the Metropolitan Opera which is something I have always wanted, but may never actually do. I actually cried as they panned the audience. It was what made it the most real for me and I cried from being overwhelmed with the experience of somehow being in the Met, not from sadness.

New York is a mythical place to me. New York is such an object of my artistic experience - it's in Woody Allen Movies and it's the location of THE Opera and THE Ballet. Simon and Garfunkel give concerts in the park and Bono rides a flatbed truck through the city singing. It's the setting for Catcher in the Rye and Eloise among others. It is ethnic and intellectual and artistic and dangerous. ("I did Shakespeare in the park. I got mugged." - name that movie-)

I felt a long way from New York when we stepped out of the theater onto a quiet midwestern college campus. There were huge snowflakes coming down. I zipped my son's coat for him (he already had his gloves on and couldn't manage the zipper). He took my hand and we walked through the softly falling snow to the car.

"Thanks to taking me to New York to the Opera, Mom," he giggled. He was quite taken with the idea that we had transported ourselves to New York.

"You bet, hon."

I took four kids to the Metropolitan Opera in New York City last night.