Angels and Lyrics
Angels and Lyrics
Christmas In The High Notes
December 3, 2018
Isabel Leonard: Queen of Christmas and All Other Known Things
The only thing Isabel Leonard does better than sing is to just sit there.
Or stand there.
Her voice, her face, her grace, her majesty stay with you long after the lights have gone up and the opera has ended.
We should probably say long after the "fat lady sings" but Isabel Leonard is not fat. Not that we'd care if she were. More of her to see, to love, to imagine sipping wine with on Thanksgiving, decorating the tree with a few days later, singing carols with on Christmas and pulling on a sled during January's first blizzard.
Isabel Leonard sings opera and saves the world, though maybe not quite in that order.
We don't know her, we'll never meet her and if we did we'd be so nervous that we would likely just burp or cry and then politely excuse ourselves from the room so that we might go play in traffic.
When we listen to Ms. Leonard we are taken from the computer screen to a crowded opera house in New York City. Then her voice carries us to Tom Hulce, the Marx Brothers, and Bugs Bunny because to us, that's opera. We don't know opera for what it really is, or what we're supposed to think it is which is something so difficult to do that we can't understand it's actually human beings doing it.
Opera is silly, right? In a good way. Who the hell sings all the words? Opera singers do. Mighty Mouse, too.
We sit at the old, long wooden dining room table late on a December night and think of the leaves that have wickedly reemerged. We didn't have time to clear them all before the first snowstorm attacked and then when that snow melted it left the leaves uncovered, no longer a colorful display of nature's beautiful transformations but soggy corpses of nature's relentless indifference.
We think that we need to clear the rest of the leaves before another snow falls and we complete our list to Santa Claus, which includes that $68 dollar jug of maple syrup we saw last weekend. We were allowed a taste and we wanted the whole jug so badly but could not pull the trigger.
We write to Santa that the we'd like the syrup, maybe a few more pens and a football. And please bring the dog some of those peanut butter treats she gobbles up happily while stretched on the floor near the TV.
And, please Santa, on Christmas Eve make Isabel Leonard's house your first stop and ask her to ride with you. Give her a cold bottle of diet Cheerwine soda and a blanket and ask her to sing as you circle the world bringing toys and sleds to all the good girls and boys. And the naughty ones, too.
Ask Isabel to sing opera - any opera she likes - and ask her to sing What Child Is This? And ask her to sing Daniel Johnston's True Love Will Find You in the End.
Ask her, Santa, to just keep singing. And when you get to our house you don't even have to slow down, Santa. Just tell her to sing, to sing, and to rejoice and we'll hear her even if we're asleep.
Even if we're no longer breathing.
Even if we were never born we'll hear the voice of eternity, the power of hope and the spirit of Christmas reaching back to the cold, hungry days when we were alone and to the dark, lost nights when we were afraid.
And when we wake up we'll know that it isn't Isabel Leonard we were dreaming of, Santa. And it wasn't you we were hoping for.
It was that feeling we first had during those Christmas days so long ago. The feeling that even though we couldn't see or hear something we still knew it happened.
And we held on to it, on to it, on to it and on to it until our fingers hurt and we had to close our eyes just to breathe. --TK
Monday, December 3, 2018