Les folies bourgeoise, Herb Caen, 1967
The annual Hairdressers’ and Dressmakers’ Costume Ball, with incidental music by Amilcare Ponchielli, opened Tuesday night at the Opera House, and, except for occasional interruptions by a traveling band of minstrels, the evening was pronounced a signal success — the principal signal being a strangled, “Hey, bartender, where’s that drink I ordered an hour ago?” As the beginning of the fall season it was the absolute end, and the flower and glory of our metropolis was there in full drag, madly playing the great game of Very San Francisco, the men done up to their false teeth, the women with every false hair in place, the false smiles being worn bravely from 5:30 p.m. till 3:30 a.m. If you get the idea that it was something less than culture’s finest hour, you could be right.
The trouble with opera openings in this town is that they start rather obscenely in broad daylight, providing the unique spectacle of men wearing white tie, tails and sunglasses.
En route to this twi-night doubleheader I sat back in that smashing car, turned on “Garrison’s Gorillas,” and browsed through Kobbe’s Complete Book of the Opera, which devotes seven full pages to the evening’s bon-bon, Signor Ponchielli’s “La Gioconda.”
Like most librettos, this one makes no sense at all (“When he has gone, Gioconda, who anticipating the fate that might befall the woman who has saved her mother, has been in hiding in the palace, hastens to Laura and hands her a flask containing a narcotic that will create the semblance of death” — and like that).
[...] there’s Renato Cioni, who sings North Beach tenor, mainly from da t’roat, wearing a neo Shriner’s outfit and Adler elevator booties (this is not one of Kurt Herbert Adler’s sidelines, so far as is known.) Anyway, the book was right, except that Mme. Gencer didn’t stab herself in the end.
“Halloween,” corrected Maryon Davis Lewis, darkly eyeing a woman wearing more falls than Niagara and false eyelashes that flies could use as a landing field.
[...] it’s nice to know what the culturati really dig.
Whereas the ladies all have to have new gowns for the opera, it’s a source of pride among men to boast about the age of their tails — a nice example of reverse snobbism.
John Rosekrans, Jr., was wearing his late father’s white waistcoat it was John Sr., at an opera opening, who once coined the classic complaint about champagne: “You get full before you get tight.”
Tucking some between my legs, I fled the scene, reflecting that whereas Kurt Adler had succeeded in reviving “La Gioconda” in four hours, revising this particular audience would take considerably longer.