From grits to UGA football to the Atlanta Opera, legendary humorist and columnist Lewis Grizzard wrote about it all. On Nov. 7, 2019, Grizzard, one of Atlanta’s most beloved columnists, will be inducted into the Atlanta Press Club Hall of Fame.
As a special gift to readers, we’re sharing some of Grizzard’s most memorable columns, published many years ago on the pages of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. We hope you enjoy Grizzard’s work — whether you’ve savored them before or are just reading them for the first time.
Check out the Nov. 10 print edition of the AJC for a special section collecting these columns; you can also view the section online in the AJC ePaper on Nov. 10.
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A number of my uncultured friends have been giving me the business about attending the opera recently, the same evening of a Braves-Giants baseball game the sportswriters called the most important regular season Atlanta game since the beginning of time.
Naturally, I have not allowed this criticism to bother me. I would not have thought of missing the opening of the Atlanta Opera Company’s “La Boheme” for something as pedestrian as a baseball game.
Besides, I couldn’t get tickets to the ballgame. A couple of $48 back-row seats for “La Boheme” were a cinch.
“The game was on TV,” said my friends, who think opera is for people who call spaghetti pasta.
I even had to drag my lovely fiancee, Dedra, to the performance. She wanted to stay home and read the latest John Grisham legal novel, “The Bill.”
“You’ll love the opera,” I said. ” ‘La Boheme’ is very romantic.”
“That’s what you said about the Citrus Bowl,” she argued.
Some people, like me, are born to culture. Others have it thrust upon them. That’s what Richard Gere said to Julia Roberts, by the way, when he took her to see the opera in “Pretty Woman” where she wet her britches. I mean, she liked it better than “Rags to Riches.”
“La Boheme” is about a sick girl who dies. She coughs a lot in the first three acts and then dies in the fourth.
The thing about opera, however, is a cough can last 15 minutes.
This wasn’t my first opera. I attended the opera once in Vienna. That opera was about everybody wanting to go to bed with the plump chambermaid.
There were two primary differences between the Vienna opera and the Atlanta opera.
In Vienna, the hall wasn’t air-conditioned. The plump chambermaid looked like she’d been through two IRS audits by the end of the performance.
It was quite comfortable in Atlanta’s Symphony Hall, however. Put on an opera in Atlanta in early September in a building that isn’t air- conditioned and the joint would smell like Ron Gant’s socks after a doubleheader.
What else was different was there was a screen above the stage in Atlanta that offered English subtitles. That’s how I learned an operatic cough could last 15 minutes.
A man sang and sang and sang to the sick girl. The screen flashed what he said in English, which came out, “You OK?”
She replied for 15 minutes, hitting notes that could have thrown Delta flights landing at Hartsfield off course, and, at the end, the screen flashed “Haaaaack!” To be perfectly honest about it, I was a bit embarrassed for my hometown. I thought showing English subtitles at the opera was saying to us, “We know you rubes have no idea what’s going on here, so we’ll make it easy for you.”
I, of course, didn’t need them.
In the “Godfather,” for instance, somebody rambled on for 15 minutes in Italian, and I knew what he had said was, “Cut off the horse’s head and put it in the creep’s bed.”
Something else embarrassed me, too. There were many Atlanta operagoers who sat there with plugs in their ears listening to radios.
Just before the sick girl died a lot of them cheered.
“They shouldn’t cheer anybody dying,” said Dedra.
“They’re not,” I said. “I think the Braves just scored.”
Imagine people sitting at an opera listening to a baseball game. Especially when they paid $48 to see what amounted to a Luden’s commercial.
Sept. 8, 1993
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