Day two of the Metropolitan Opera Conference experience began with a bang.  Literally.  But before that, as I tend to check my email when I wake up, I received an email from one of my practicum students who was presenting today at school with a request to project something for her lesson.  I’m obviously not there, so I attempt to open the document on my phone which looks like some kind of secret code for James Bond.  I try again with the same result.  This means starting up the laptop, which was NOT part of the schedule this morning, and of course, I can’t connect to the WiFi because, well, it’s me and it’s going to be one of those mornings.  After discovering that New York has a free WiFi you can connect to (since the hotel’s wasn’t working), I successfully sent her document to both my sub and her supervisor.  I’m running a bit behind now, but I’ll just kick into overdrive and get ready faster.

Except for the shower.  The shower is one of those wonderful rain showers with a detachable hand sprayer, which is where all the water was coming from.  So, a few minutes to figure out how to shift the water into my now shortened time frame and off we go.  Everything was set out the night before, so I’m cooking now.  Until I plug in the hair dryer.  It had been left “on” so when I plugged it in, it started immediately.  That was ok until the CRACK, CRACK, POP, POP  and the lovely burning smell that emanated from the now dead hair dryer.  Now we’re improvising.  I’m not going to work at the Met this morning with wet hair, so what to do?  Call housekeeping, telling them you’re supposed to leave to go to the Met in 15 minutes and you need a new hair dryer now – please.  I then proceeded to do anything I needed to do while waiting for it to arrive.  Thirteen minutes later, I text my colleague and tell her the dilemma and ask can I use your hair dryer?  She arrived a few minutes before housekeeping, so now I had two hairdryers.  I did learn that curling irons don’t do much good drying your hair by the way.

We dash over the Met just in time to get through security and now I can relax. It’s the same routine I’ve seen now for years, we walk through the golden gates, down to breakfast, past the man vacuuming the red carpet, which is also up the walls, so does he vacuum that too I wonder, and watch through the door leading to the house where workmen are changing out the sets for tonight’s opera. All relaxing and familiar until we begin to talk about improv and beat boxing.  Yes, you heard that right, we were beat boxing at the Met.  Crazy stuff.  Oh, and did I mention the speaker we had this morning went to school with Lin-Manuel Miranda and just happened to produce In the  Heights – a little show on Broadway a few years ago.  Improv and rap seem to be one of his things and although scary, it was fun.  AND we’re going to learn how to do stop animation AND we got to play games, rewrite lyrics to an aria and perform them in a group, cut and paste and all kinds of things. All in the name of getting kids excited about opera.  All to help us understand how our kids might feel when we ask them to do some of these things in our classrooms.  Learning to have empathy.  It’s powerful stuff.

Lunch arrived at 1:45 (I’m used to eating at 11:45) and we scarfed it down before walking across the street to Juilliard.  Sure, like just anyone gets to go to Juilliard and study anything.  Yes, I know how lucky I am.  And here I got to learn about La Traviata and hear an interview with the woman who is the executive stage director at the Met.  Fascinating work this woman does.  Everyday stuff.

So, nine hours after we began our day, we were “released into the wild” where we grabbed dinner at a VERY loud restaurant with great food and then took the subway to Times Square to see the show Dear Evan Hansen.  Sometimes when life gets busy, you forget just how good music and theater can be.  I’m still processing what I saw and heard.  Nothing better than sharing an experience like that with a good friend and colleague as well.  We opted to take a brisk walk back to the hotel on a beautiful evening, where the smell of garbage and pot wafted through the air (it IS New York after all) and where we were surrounded by a kaleidoscope of people speaking different languages, dressed in different ways, of every ethnicity, culture – you name it – all of them dodging cars and each others on the streets of New York.  I’ve said it before – it’s an amazing place.

And now it’s time to crash for another day in the life tomorrow – more learning, more new experiences, more great music.  Can it get any better than this?