A Midsummer Night’s Nightmare: 
Britten’s opera preceded by dinner 
with an old friend and a new acquaintance. 
My wife’s repeated questions to her were bad enough
—And what do you do when you’re not 
doing bridge? Doing bridge? Not doing bridge? 
Do you have children? Have children? Do you 
have children? You told me that. Told 
me that. But then the haranguing 
of this poor woman: Well, why would someone care 
about that? Want to do that? Care about that? 
And later, at the opera, the noisy protestations 
that she was perfectly capable of navigating
those steep tiered aisles, fueled 
by the two glasses of wine she had just about 
chug-a-lugged (and which would have been three, 
but only over my dead body). Not fay, 
charming Moth or Cobweb, not even fractious 
Tytania, she was Lady Macbeth, Lady Caliban 
to me, finally lolling on my shoulder, sundowning 
into Britten’s layered telling of the tale, 
into a very personal midnight madness.