New York, New York

Headline: "Airlines are in a hiring frenzy." 

Headline: "Airline prices up 25%, outpacing inflation."

Headline: "U.S. Hotel occupancy back to pre-Covid levels."

Americans have decided Covid is over. Tourism is back. 

Tam Moore, whose 60-plus year career as a journalist suggests his age, did not let Covid-caution stop him from traveling across the country to see a grandson graduate from college. He wrote two Guest Posts about touring historic Boston. Another frequent Guest Post author, Jack Mullen, is a lifelong sports fan. He mixed his interest in sports with his wife's interest in opera to travel to New York City to see an opera about a welterweight boxer.

Today's post is not about the economy and how people think about it. (People think it is terrible for others, but that they themselves are doing OK, so they are continuing to spend, including travel.) But that subject is for another day. Today the Guest Post is about seeing an opera at Lincoln Center on the economy-track -- but that didn't get in Jack Mullen's way. Everything worked out great.

Guest Post by Jack Mullen

No city stirs one’s emotions like New York City, especially for someone who grew up in faraway Medford, Oregon. As my wife and I planned for a three day stay in the Big Apple, we researched all the Broadway and off-Broadway productions. None floated our boat.

Knowing my wife loves opera, I took a wild stab at mentioning “Champion”, a modern opera about Emile Griffith, a boxer that I remembered from my youth. Even though Jennifer prefers traditional over modern opera, and didn’t have the vaguest idea who Emile Griffith was, she agreed we should venture to Lincoln Center’s Metropolitan Opera. We purchased two box seat tickets in the lower tier balcony, seats that we were warned had an obstructed view.

Wide eyed, yet acting cool, we arrived at the Met early enough to check out our seats. I quickly realized my view from the third row of our box seats cut off two-thirds of the stage. Having perfected the fine art of moving to empty, but more expensive seats at ball games, I decided, once the curtain was drawn, and the opera started, that we could move to the empty box closest to the stage. We quickly moved to our new box, and as I looked down at the orchestra pit, I realized this vacant box had not only an unobstructed view of the stage, but we may just be in possession of the best seats in the house. No one came to tell us to move.

The mid-20th-Century Medford of my youth was a "Friday Night Lights" type of town. Before venturing across town for the 8 p.m. kickoff of Medford Black Tornado football games, everyone tuned into local Channel 5’s Gillette Cavalcade of Sports to watch live boxing from Madison Square Garden. Among the household names of boxers in the pre-Muhammed Ali era was Emile Griffith, a charismatic welterweight from the Virgin Islands.

What I, as a 14-year-old, and everyone else of my generation who watched Friday night boxing remembered, was Emile Griffith knocking out his opponent, Benny "Kid” Paret in the 12th round of a championship fight. Paret lay motionless on the canvas. Most of us didn’t realize that Emile Griffith was bisexual and that Paret had unmercifully taunted Griffith for being gay. As a result of the taunts, Griffith unleashed such a fury of punches that they left “The Kid” in a coma. Paret died one week later.

Emile Griffith’s hard-scrabble life of abandonment by his mother leading to the apex of boxing, a world championship, then the guilt of having killed a man, provided Terrance Blanchard a perfect operatic script.

Opera needs to attract a new, younger audience. The Met seems to realize that operas such as “Champion” are needed to appeal to a wider demographic than just old folks who, when they pass away, leave opera as some sort of museum relic. “Champion” fit the bill of a modern opera with its gay nightclub scenes, a beautifully choreographed fight scene, and a sad, old Emile Griffith fading away in a retirement home. I noted an audience at the Met that was both young and old, gay and straight, and African American and White.

During the long intermission, I chatted with the two elderly gentlemen in the adjacent box. Just before the curtain raised before the next act, one of the gentlemen, with a gleam in his eye, informed me that we were sitting in the “Director’s Box.” At the end of the opera, after all the curtain calls, my new best friend in the adjacent box told me, “I didn’t think you were the Director, I just thought you were a wealthy patron.”

In the song New York, New York, Frank Sinatra sings "If I can make it there, I can make it anywhere.” Well, in my one and only trip to Lincoln Center, I made it to the best seat in the Met. A nice way to experience New York, New York.

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