Who's afraid of giants and dragons when you've got love on your side?

This weekend, to my utter delight I got to see possibly one of my favorite operas, Tristan und Isolde. It's been about - gee - a gazillion  - or maybe just ten - years since I last saw it, but half a measure of the overture and I'm sold for the next five hours. When I first saw it, the director cast Ben Heppner and Jane Eaglen (at the peaks of their careers) into something akin to The Titanic - whether to complement the girth of their voices or midriffs I couldn't say (my dad and I had a running and highly irreverent joke about the first time the two lovers moved to kiss each other and couldn't reach each other's lips due to their collective stomacherosity). This time, the director went a little different route, one that is sure to ring controversy in the Seattle opera echelons for years to come (and inspiring an undercurrent of booing in an otherwise uproarious standing ovation as we moved from singers to directors). Drawing on the Ambrose Bierce story, Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, the classic story of love and lust was presented as "an opera of the mind" filled with surrealism and symbolic elements. As you can see, the final result was truly innovative:

Ok, that might not have been the direction they chose to go (going for more of a creepy nihilistic buddhism/Twilight Zone undertone that may have complemented the music and the opera's sentiments a little better), but in spirit, I think this was what they had in mind.

In other news, I have managed to detach half of my permanent retainer, creating something akin to rogue barbed wire fence in the lower half of my mouth. Victory is mine! Take that mouth-cement! FREE RETAINER!!! Things are slowly sorting themselves out in terms of speaking and little habitual tongue motions that put me into peril of pokes. However, it has created an entirely new cadre of complications to my mastication habits (yes, I admit it. I'm not ashamed of my body: I masticate many times a day with great zest). Since eating is already a fun challenge for me, this has been a blast. Mostly I've gotten to a point where I am able to eat just so long as I don't need my lower front teeth. My mouth is fairly functional, but taking bites from masses of food in order to get a bite of food into my mouth in the first place is something of a challenge - it's like having an overzealous bouncer lurking behind my lips. I've mostly gotten around this by eating semi-solid foods, but there are some solids that I can "bite" by pressing food into my upper incisors with my tongue. Works with bananas pretty well. Not so effective with carrots. I also try incising with my molars, to fascinating effect. I'm getting the darned thing fixed in a few days, but it's a fascinating insight into the processes of eating that perhaps I have taken for granted up until now.