My friend, Tina Smith-Brown, author of the novel Fish and Grits, scheduled for reissue next year by Tursulowe Press, and the Letter to My Father workshop, was never particularly interested in opera. Still, she listened as I talked about writing librettos in American Lyric Theater’s Composer-Librettist Development Program. Here she talks about what happens when you open up, with curious generosity, to the passion of a friend.

 

 

 

 

  Reaping

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At sixty-one, sixty-two in January, it feels inconceivable to me that I would still find such pleasure in discovering a copacity for growth, interest, and change that I didn’t realize I still possessed. As a kid I had always imagined that people the age I am now had settled into the earth, planted themselves to await the reaping of their lives:  not seeking or sowing anything new.  It’s stunning to me, that things that interested me not one bit, like cooking, sewing, or listening to opera are being shaken out of me, like seedlings waiting to be planted anew.

 

Skipping up and down North Philly sidewalks, with scarred knees from falls against cement, I took in music all day. It burst from windows trying to suck in a cool breeze from a summer heat, or lopsided screen doors that screeched when opened, or booming car radios that rattled the nerves of the old and lightened the hearts of the young. R&B and gospel, lullabies of inner city living, held me in their arms, safe in their rhythmic familiarity. Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition” and “Living for the City,” The Isley Brothers’ “Harvest for the World,” The Jackson Five’s Christmas Albums, and Marvin’s “Let’s Get it On”—not an operatic solo in the bunch. I was happy, satisfied, clueless, not interested at all in the music that only seemed to play on “rich people’s” record players.

 

Then, came my time on the board of Art Sanctuary. Our “Hip H’Opera” asked composers chosen by Opera Philadelphia to set the poems of afterschool students, and the soil of familiarity began to shift beneath me. Then hanging out with people who loved different kinds of music, plays, and events that had always felt too far away for me to reach. The earth widened as I discovered that things were closer than I’ve ever dreamed.

 

The final crack in my surface has come in the form of a friend, a friend who always seems to be reinventing herself: but a librettist?  I’m embarrassed to say that before Lorene made the announcement, I had never even heard of librettists. For a solid year, I watched her schlep back and forth between Philly and New York City, on buses or trains, (would have been on bicycle if she’d had to) determined. How could I not wonder: what was so special about this opera stuff? So, I listened, and I grew, because there is no way I would be sitting in the audience of her new opera, Jubilee!, the only one not understanding what is happening. By the time that takes place in 2026 I’ll be ready, because that’s just what friends do. We reap from each others’ newly sown fields, even when we have no idea what they'll produce.