Backstage at the Opera House

In the wings, we are all waiting to become someone else. The soprano adjusts her wig, the tenor clears his throat of his real voice, preparing to fill it with another's passion. The costume mistress makes her rounds, tugging at seams, pinning last-minute fixes, her mouth full of needles and unspoken prayers that nothing will split, nothing will fall, nothing will reveal the ordinary bodies beneath these elaborate disguises. I watch the baritone practice dying— he's been killed in seven different operas and knows exactly how to fall so it looks like tragedy instead of a middle-aged man with a mortgage and bad knees carefully lowering himself to the floor. The mezzo-soprano smokes in the doorway, still in full costume, a medieval queen with a lighter and a nicotine habit, checking her phone between arias. Her daughter texted: Break a leg, Mom. She stubs out the cigarette, straightens her crown, and steps back into the fifteenth century. This is the magic they don't tell you about— not the transformation that happens under the lights, in front of the audience, but this one, here in the shadows: the moment when ordinary people decide to become extraordinary, when they choose to step out of their lives and into someone else's story. The stage manager calls places. The orchestra tunes. The house lights dim. And one by one, we walk through that curtain, leaving behind our real names, our real problems, our real selves, to become what the music demands: lovers, warriors, gods, ghosts— anything but what we were when we walked in the stage door this morning with our coffee and our ordinary faces. The performance begins. We transform. And for two hours, we are not pretending. We are not acting. We are simply becoming what we were always meant to be in this temporary, beautiful, impossible world where anyone can be anyone as long as the music plays.