Its Crystalline Exosphere

Because the Orthodox complain, Israel has never adopted Daylight Savings Time, which means that, in July, one awakens at 8:30 to sunshine hot as a Phoenix noon.  One swallows one’s shirred eggs under a café umbrella heated to radium white and prays the cab can penetrate the arteriosclerotic traffic in time to deliver you to the stage door by eleven.  When at last you lurch into the backseat-Bauhaus must wait-your driver’s accent is pure Calabria, except it isn’t: fifty if a day, he’s lived in Israel six years, but “mama and papa were Yemen.”  Shared vowels make us all brethren: if that isn’t the motto of IVAI, (and it isn’t,) it should be.

The last stage-orchestra run.  So much of instrumental rehearsal consists of the sort of picky-picky tedium that would drive an accountant to nude karaoke, and yet I can’t stay away: it’s transfixing to hear these players, bar by bar, spin the straw of notes and rests into the gold of gesture, of paragraph.  You exhale, knowing the materials have been corrected: still, every time the orchestra sings as one, you feel like Annie Sullivan thrilling to Helen’s request for that first drink.  Meanwhile, onstage, Larry’s cast acts and sings as if every moment matters, which, in fact, it does: he’s also had the wit to order the sisters’ laundry-game banner emblazoned in both English and Hebrew.  Where if not in Tel Aviv?  I make him promise to take it back to the States for me at the run’s end, and my demands don’t stop there: as both director and conductor have been working heroically, I insist they permit me to take them that night to Mul Yam (Tel Aviv’s answer to Le Bernardin) as an a priori thank you.  It’s impossibly lavish and yet just right, concluding, at dessert, with a kind of Fabergé egg of spun sugar as redly glowing as Mars: we shatter its crystalline exosphere and plunge spoons like meteors into a mountain range of lemon mousse. These are the problems to have.  We’d like to linger, but we don’t dare: tomorrow at dawn Larry and I must catch a plane to Petra, a modern wonder of the world.

Frizzante, in Hebrew.