Meet Me Before Recondita Armonia

At full capacity, San Francisco's AT&T Ballpark by the waterfront can accommodate 41,503 guests. On Friday June 5, although there was no game scheduled, a surging crowd rolled through its gates, filling over half the seats.

That was the night Puccini's heroine Tosca and her lover Cavaradossi were supposed to meet their unhappy ends (he in a hail of bullets from a firing squad, she by leaping to her death from a parapet), right by the home plate where Giant outfielder Barry Bond hit his 756th homerun in 2007. It was a tragedy with no admission fee, part of San Francisco Opera's simulcast series for the 2009-2010 season.

My Facebook friend Tracy and I were in the audience that night. We'd arrived separately, each with our own friends, then discovered we were at the same event. So, even though we'd never met in person, we decided we would somehow find each other in the human sea, with the help of text messaging.

About 15 minutes before the show began, I received directions from Tracy: We're in the VIP box. Come up to the second level, tell the guard you're the late-arriving member of Tracy's party, then head to the right once inside.

My friend Julie, who caught me texting a reply to Tracy, accused me of "two-timing."

"What is that?" she asked. "You came here with us; now you're going to meet another group?"
"No, it's not like that," I answered. "One of my Facebook friends is here. I just want to say 'Hello' to her."
"Uh huh, sure," said Julie.

Under the starry sky, the 103-feet-wide scoreboard came to life. It showed a bird's eye view of the orchestra pit. The E note (traditionally used by musicians to tune their instruments) dangled in the evening mist, thick with the smell of grilled meat and garlic fries from the concession stand.



Going against traffic, I made my way from the Promenade Level (third floor) to the VIP Suites. I navigated past the looping queues, past the people hurrying towards the mustard dispensers and sauerkraut tubs.

"Where are the VIP Suites?" I asked the security guard, a stern-looking woman in a starched navy-blue suit.
"It's right here," she said. "What's your name?"

She consulted her clipboard, where I knew my name wouldn't be found.

"I'm the late-arriving member of Tracy's party," I parroted my friend's text message.
"What company is the party with?" she asked.

Oh, shoot!

I remembered a late-night phone conversation where Tracy (thankfully) mentioned where she worked.

"Um, Genentech, I think," I said.

The guard wasn't convinced.

"Do you know what suite she's in?"
"Um, I'm afraid I don't know."
"Come with me, " said the guard, as she escorted me inside the booth. "Do you see your friend anywhere?"

As reliable as my memory was, it was impossible for me to pick out someone I'd only seen in photos from a group of people with their backs turned towards me.

"She's tall," I said in desperation, "very tall."

For some reason, most of the women in the VIP box that evening happened to be of impressive height. I tried to remember the photos I'd seen in Tracy's Facebook album. Were there any shots of her from behind? What did her head look like from the back?

As I scanned the box's occupants, the gatekeeper began to look impatient. She'd met more than her fair share of frauds; she wasn't about to let another one slip by.

"Why don't you call her?" she suggested. "Find out which suite her party is in."

Until I could produce that crucial piece of information, she was going to have to keep me off premise.

I stepped outside and texted Tracy: Apparently I'd need to tell them the name of your suite. What is that?
She replied: Hang on. I'll come out.

Just then, I heard an explosion of applause, signaling the beginning of Act I. I imagined the opening scene in The church of Sant'Andrea della Valle, where Tosca's lover Cavaradossi was painting a portrait of Mary Magdalena. In a few minutes, the tenor playing Cavaradossi would sing his first aria, Recondita Armonia (Concealed Harmony). It was too late for me to find my way back to the upper level to catch that. It looked as though I'd have to hear this famous number right there, concealed behind the bathroom stalls and the elevator shafts.

Then my cellphone rang.

"Hey, where are you?" Tracy asked.
"I'm standing right outside the door that says Press and VIP Guests Only," I said. "They let me go inside earlier to look for you, but I couldn't find you."

At that moment, I noticed the security guard, the Valkyrie in blue, waving to get my attention. I turned to where she was gesturing at. My friend Tracy was standing three feet away from me.

We both put away out cellphones sheepishly and started laughing. We hugged and kissed for the first time.

Then Cavaradossi began singing:

Recondita armonia di belleze diverse!
E bruna Floria, l'ardente amante mia.
E te, beltade ignota, cinta di chiome bionde!
Tu azzuro hai l'occhio, Tosca ha l'occhio nero!

What strange and lovely harmony of such different beauties!
How dark is Floria, this ardent love of mine.
And you, mysterious beauty, long and blond flowing tresses,
how your eyes are sky-blue, Tosca's eyes are black-night.

(For Placido Domingo's version of this song on YouTube, click here.)

Kismet in Exit Row

At 3:30 PM on Tuesday, I discovered Fate had decided to thwart me off my course.

I was flying home from an out-of-town reporting assignment. The first leg of my journey was smooth sailing (so to speak), but the second was in jeopardy. There was a 1.5 hours delay, which would make me miss my connecting flight for the home stretch. In a calm, indifferent demeanor I found highly insulting, the airline's customer service rep told me that, by the time I landed in Vegas, all the outbound flights for San Francisco would have already left, leaving me with no choice but to spend the night at the airport, amidst a chorus of slot machines.

Then my guardian angel intervened. With a few keystrokes on the computer, a hefty supervisor named Wendy rewrote my destiny (and my boarding passes). She put me on a direct flight to San Francisco, bypassing Sin City altogether. With this small gesture, she had unknowingly put me in a seat in the Exit Row next to Frankie, a photographer who would capture my imagination without a camera.

Frankie had short, rippled hair that flowed like an unruly river, where griffins dipped their wings and washed their beaks. Its color reminded me of Sangria, mixed with a measure of Homer's wine-dark sea. The tattooed image of a femme fatale in trenchcoat and fedora (the original was by a French artist, she later told me) sprawled across her right arm.

"Are you just visiting Houston? Or from here?" she asked.
"I'm just passing through. This is my stopover," I said.
"Oh, where did you come from?" she asked.

Somehow, I found myself unable to recall my point of origin. Like a bumbling idiot, I had to look at my ticket to figure it out.

"I was in Orlando," I said.
"I'd just been on a road trip," she said.

She showed me a series of photos on her iPhone. As she brushed her fingers on the device's surface (marked by two large intersecting cracks), the Arizona plains and the clear blue sky flashed by. Watching heaven and earth tumble like playthings at her fingertips, I remembered the famous lines by Blake:

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

Her road trip, Frankie revealed, was a bit of a letdown. She had misjudged her traveling companions' spirit of exploration.

"Like, when we were in Nashville or Texas, I would have Yelped for good places to eat, then checked them out," she said. But her fellow travelers preferred to stick to the familiar, so she went along, swallowing a series of bland meals in nondescript roadside diners.

When the stewardesses brought the food cart out, she bit down on the frosty cheese burger, as if it were her revenge for the gas-station sandwiches she'd been made to eat for the past two weeks.

"You want a piece of chocolate?" she offered, picking up the last item on her tray. I didn't have the heart to rob her of her Lilliputian desert.
"Go for it," I said.

By the time complimentary beverages arrived, we were deeply engaged in a philosophical discussion, spanning Shamanism, Buddhism, Adam and Eve, and Original Sin (all stemming from a chapter in The Road Less Traveled, the book she'd brought along).

"Let's try something," I suggested. "Let's see if we can take turn guessing something about each other."
"OK," she said. "I think, in the last year, you ended a relationship that lasted more than four years."
"I was disappointed by a relationship," I told her, "because it was unrequited. I wanted it more than she did."
"Unrequited," she repeated. "I think I'd heard it only three of four times in my life."

Then it was my turn.

"I think you're still friends with the first guy who's ever broke your heart," I said.
"Why?" she asked.
"Because you just seem like you have what it takes to work though something like that to retain a friendship," I said.

I was right on this account, she confirmed.

"I think you speak at least three languages," she said.

She got that one right, I confirmed.

"I think the first tattoo you've ever had was the name of someone," I said.
"Nope," she said. "It's the Libra sign."

She leaned over and showed me the tiny mark on her nape. The symbol drawn in maroon ink shone under the dim cabin-light like an Egyptian cuneiform, an oracle from the sun god Ra.

"My sister was supposed to get one like this," she said. "But she didn't."
"So it was an unrequited tattoo," I said, which prompted a giggle.

Then we decided to play my other favorite game: Pretend to be someone else. We agreed that, for the remainder of the flight, we'd both take on fictional personas. She chose to be Ruth, who was adopted when she was a little girl; I chose to retain my real name but play the son of her neighbor who moved away, launched a dot-com, lost everything he had, then moved back to his hometown.

"So what kind of dot-com did you start?" she began.
"It was a dating site," I said.
"Why did it fail?"
"I had this idea that people would like a dating site where they have to be honest about who they are. But it seems most people would rather date others based on illusions and fantasies. So they logged off without even finishing the questionnaire."
"What's that site called?"
"Downwithcupid.com."
"I think I had a profile there once."

On the flickering video monitor, the plot of The Pink Panther 2 thickened, taking Inspector Clouseau through the maze of Paris. In the two isolated seats in the Exit Row, we wrote our own plot. Before the seat-belt sign came back on, I managed to create a brother who had a crush on her; Frankie returned the favor by conjuring up an exboyfriend who died from inhaling paint. Then Frankie, in character as Ruth, offered to work for me as a bookkeeper for the bed and breakfast I was thinking of buying and running. That was when we felt the touchdown.

Now that cellphones were permitted once again, she pinged me to put her number in my phone. I saved it with the name Ruth.

"Don't you remember my name?" she asked
"I'm not likely to forget a name like Frankie," I told her.
"I think this is kismet," she said.

It was a term I was oblivious to.

"What's that?" I asked.
"Kismet, like Destiny," she replied.

About 12 hours after our goodbye hug, Frankie and I became buddies on Facebook. Maybe, one day, we'll revive the story of Ruth over coffee, argue over the wallpaper patterns for the imaginary bed and breakfast I would buy and she would manage, and discuss plans to relaunch Downwithcupid.com.

When I blog about someone, I usually ask for the person's permission and use a nickname only. But Frankie gave me her blessings not only to write about our meeting but identify her by her real name.

So meet Frankie, or her alter ego Ruth, at this site.