I’ll admit it. I’m a bit afraid of the opera. I want to like it.  I like the music, the pageantry, the concept of it. I love the idea of dressing for the opera. I feel like I’m supposed to like it.

But, I always feel a bit, well, dumb when I think about the opera.  Funny, because my first opera experience–at the Metropolitan Opera in NYC, back in the day before the translations scrolled above the stage–included a pre-performance conversation with a friend’s professor who told us the story (The Magic Flute with Red Buttons of all people, if I remember correctly), prepped us, and accompanied us. And, I loved it.

Flash forward a decade to Chicago, home of the Lyric Opera.  All I really knew about the Lyric was that it may have been the model for the opera house in Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane  and…