Dave Barry Is from Mars and Venus by Dave Barry

away
.
Okapis are members of the mammal family.
Most human beings, not counting Congress, are also members of the mammal family.
    When I consider these facts together, a very disturbing question comes to my mind, as I’m sure it does yours:
What were three football fields doing in Denmark?
    Another question is: Could opera, in sufficient dosages, also be fatal to human beings? The only way to find out is to conduct a scientific experiment, in which we would take a group of volunteer subjects—and as the person proposing this experiment, I am willing to courageously volunteer that these subjects be scientists from the Tobacco Institute—strap them into chairs, and blast opera at them twenty-four hours a day until such time as they are dead.
    Of course to ensure that this experiment was scientifically valid, we’d also need what is known technically as a “control;” this would be a second group of volunteer Tobacco Institute scientists, who would be strapped into chairs and blasted with some
other
kind of music. I am thinking here of the Neil Diamond Christmas album.
    Once this experiment had proved scientifically that opera music is fatal, it would be time to think about requiring that some kind of Surgeon General warning be prominently displayed on Luciano Pavarotti. Also we’d have to study the effects of “secondhand opera,” which is what you get when inconsiderate individuals start humming opera music in a poorly ventilated office, and suddenly their coworkers are dropping like flies, especially if their coworkers happen to be okapis.
    Ultimately, we may have to ban opera altogether, along with—you can’t take chances with the public health—ballet, nonrhyming poetry, movies with subtitles, and any kind of sculpture that does not accurately depict naked women. I realize that, for taking this stand, I’m going to be harshly criticized by the so-called cultured crowd. But I frankly cannot worry about that, because I have the courage of my convictions. Also,
Inspector Gadget
is on.

THE FAT
LADY SINGS

    M y advice to you, if you ever get invited to play the part of a corpse in an opera, is:
Ask questions
. Here are some that I would suggest:
Does the plot of this opera call for the corpse to get shoved halfway off a bed headfirst by people shrieking in Italian?
If so, is this corpse wearing a nightgown-style garment that could easily get bunched up around the corpse’s head if the corpse finds itself in an inverted position with its legs sticking up in the air on a brightly lit stage in front of hundreds of people whom the corpse does not personally know?
If so, what, if any, provisions will be made to prevent a public viewing of the corpse’s butt?
    Fool that I am, I failed to ask these questions when I was invited to be a deceased person in an opera. This invitation resulted from a column I wrote concerning an animal in a Denmark zoo that died from stress brought on by hearingopera singers rehearse. I concluded that opera is probably fatal and should be banned as a public-health menace, just like heroin, or aspirin bottles with lids that can actually be opened.
    This column generated a large amount of mail from irate opera lovers who:
Pointed out that they are far more sophisticated, urbane, and cultured than I am, and
Used some really dirty words.
    (Here is an actual quote from one of these letters, slightly modified for the family-newspaper audience:
“Cost Van Tutte
is Italian and not Spanish, you sock plucker. Duck shoe,”)
    But I also got a very nice letter from Janice Mackey, general manager of Eugene Opera in Eugene, Oregon (civic motto: “Eventually You Stop Noticing the Rain”). She invited me to play a corpse in Eugene Opera’s January 8 performance of
Gianni Schicchi
(pronounced “Johnny SKEE-kee”), a work by the famous opera dude Puccini (“Poo-CHEE-nee”), who I believe also wrote the 1966 Tommy James hit “Hanky Panky” (“Hang-kee PANG-kee”). As a professional journalist, I am