the groundbreaking first post

Welcome to the official blog of the San Francisco Lyric Opera. As the first post, I imagine few will read this however I still feel it's important to get a feel of who is writing and why.

SFLO, as it will forever be referred to, is a small non-profit organization in San Francisco. Revived in 2002, SFLO has since staged over 80 performances of 19 productions and continues to build both its audience base and reputation for fun but quality performances of classical operas.

2006 productions consisted of Mozart's Die Zauberflöte, Verdi's Il Trovatore, Britten's The Rape of Lucretia, and Puccini's Tosca. 2007 will feature an equally impressive array of productions. In February-March we are performing Gounod's Romeo & Juliet, based of course on Shakespeare's play. May-June will feature Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor, followed by Offenbach's Tales of Hoffman in September and Strauss' Die Fledermaus in December.

Any interest in tickets, volunteering, auditioning, and so forth can all be directed to me, your humble host of this blog. Our website is www.sflyricopera.org and email is sflyricopera@hotmail.com.

As for myself, I have only begun as the production manager this year (literally 3 weeks ago) but have been stage managing for SFLO for a little over 2 years. I had no experience before. It's been an eye-opening and, at times, terrifying thing to work with no background and no idea what you're supposed to be doing. I've been living the "watch and learn" approach from Day 1 and it's been extraordinary.

On a more personal side, I'm 22 years old as of 2 days ago. I graduated from the University of San Francisco in December, with a degree in sociology because there was no music major. My plans were to become a criminologist researching causes of violent crime among death row inmates at San Quentin; funny how life leads in a completely opposite direction. I've found my background in "people-watching" has helped me to observe the subtleties of human behaviour in such a way to help me interact with the wide diversity of our wonderful patrons.

Here ends the background of our company and this blog's author. From now on, it's all current and all snapshots of how life with SFLO is: glass-breaking highs and suicide-plummet lows, primadonnas and drama, laughter and tears in the same moment, and of maybe even some singing. In a word: OPERA.