In 1937 I began my freshman
year at the High School of Commerce, Hayes and Van Ness. I was fifteen.
Across the street was the War Memorial Opera House. When the opera season
began there was a notice in our school paper "The Bulldog" that the
opera needed supers.
Didn't know what that meant but decided
to go to the opera house and find out.
A super is a supernumerary and is
used in non-singing roles to be part of the crowd. You might be a soldier
or a native spear carrier or a snake charmer. More on that later.
I was pretty tall and was offered
a job as a super... it really wasn't a job, because you didn't get paid,
but it was wonderful.
And 1937 could not have been a better
year to be a super with stars like Lily Pons and Ezio Pinza performing
at the War Memorial.
At the opera house you went down many
floors below the stage to the dressing rooms. The supers were given
costumes and were made up. I remember walking the halls and hearing
Pinza vocalizing in the distance. He shook the walls. I can still
hear him.
I once passed Pinza in a corridor,
but remembered the first rule I was given, "Supers must never speak to
the stars."
Absolutely my most exciting "role"
was as a snake charmer in Lakme. Lily Pons sang the title role. In the
second act I was seated with another super behind a basket. I was holding
a dummy wooden flute. As the curtain rose I began "playing" my flute
in cadence with a musician in the pit. The super next to me pulled on a
cord and the cobra rose out of the basket. Then Lily sang the Bell song.
Here is a picture of her from the Opera's home page.
Lily Pons
Morton Photo
That was to have been the end of my
story. I thought the San Francisco Opera might like to read it and emailed
a copy to them.
A few days later I received
an email from Kori Lockhart, who is editor for San Francisco Opera on the
web. Kori said she went through their 1937 Lakme photo files and found
one of me as the snake charmer. She scanned and emailed it to me.
Here the supers are standing around
relaxed, waiting for the curtain to go up. Why I figured I had to "rehearse"
my flute, I'll never know. Perhaps I saw the cameraman.
Morton Photo
Thank you Kori for giving me
such a wonderful link to my memories of long ago.
Bill Roddy
The San Francisco Opera
Supers of 2003 have their own web site...
Come on stage!