Back to the future. (Coda).(elementary students attend opera)(Brief Article)

Like many of my generation, as we careen toward middle age, I find my fancy wandering back to the bygone days of childhood. So when an invitation came last fall, I jumped at the chance to relive a favorite grade-school ritual: the annual class trip to the opera with P.S. 101.

It was 1972 when I first attended a student rehearsal at the Met. The opera was Don Giovanni, and I was in second grade. In my day, the cicerone for these pilgrimages was Mrs. Harris, my teacher and a former chorister at the old Met. Mrs. Harris took her opera seriously. An elegant lady of a certain age, she ruled with an iron hand -- encased in an immaculate kid glove. I can see her now, her graying hair in an elaborate chignon, her timeless beige sweater suit embellished with a long double-strand of pearls, her narrow glasses pushed forward on her nose. Even more clearly, I can hear her precise and flawless chorister's diction as she drummed the rules of theater etiquette into our young brains.

Our opera odyssey always began with mandatory before-school prep sessions. Mrs. Harris took us through the work at hand step by step with the aid of a phonograph, a pianist and a projector. (She was the only person I know who never put a slide in backwards or upside down.) In the year 2000, those still slides have been replaced by a complete performance on videotape, which covers the material but leaves little room for the personal touch. Slouched between two sixth-graders at the last of the pre-Carmen classes, I soon discover that kids are more savvy nowadays. Thirty years ago, my innocent companions and I managed to coast right by the more lurid aspects of Don Giovanni's plot. Don't ask me how Mrs. Harris explained to her charges what the title character was up to in the opening scene. The word "seduce" sticks in my mind, but there can't have been many of us who knew what that meant -- and such was Mrs. Harris's mastery that not a single hand went up to ask. Parsing Carmen, the class of 2001 deems our heroine "a little slutty," but her independent spirit rates high with the budding feminists in the group, while the domestic abuser Don Jose is dismissed as "a wimp." I discover that sixth-graders today know what an order of protection is.

For all their worldly wisdom, though, they can't spend the bus ride warming up with the famous arias, as we could. In the absence of subtitled videos, Mrs. Harris's introduction included learning at least one selection in English. I can still belt out Leporello's complaint with the best of them: "How I'd like to be a master, and no more a servant be -- no, no, no, no, no no...." To rectify this omission, I share the only English version I know of the toreador song: "Toreador-a, don't spit on the floor-a. Use the cuspidor-a -- what do you think it's for-a?" My popularity rises, even if nobody knows what a cuspidor is.

This year's trip is led by Merilyn Croslin. In keeping with enlightened teaching philosophy, Mrs. Croslin's persona is more buddy than chaperone; there's not a whiff of the ramrod strictness with which Mrs. Harris kept her pupils at bay. Still, as we file into the nosebleed section, the whole affair takes on a time-warp quality. The sight of those crystal chandeliers ...