A Woman's Life Lived Not to the Expectations of Others

 I was looking through the Arts section of the Nov. 1, 2020 Sunday New York Times  and got reading an article about a photographer named Jona Frank.

What jumped out at me was the following:

"Unlike her mother, however, she pursued her personal dreams, not others' expectations." 

This reminded me of a project of mine, proceeding very slowing at present as a result of the pandemic: trying to get at least a few arias of a neo-baroque operetta called "Patricia" composed and sung. While I may blog more about this in the future, if you are interested you can find out the details and hear a couple of songs sung here. (Click on the word "here.")

The operetta is all about a young woman named Patricia who, like Jona, doesn't want a life based on the expectations of other people.  

Jona's mother, readers learn, believed in the importance of "respectability" in traditional middle class American suburbia. "She was not a person who believed she could have options," the NYT quotes Ms Frank as saying. While her mother lived in what Ms Frank believes was "quiet despair" Ms Frank herself felt trapped in "the uncomfortable fit between societal norms and individual desires." Her photographs attempt, among other things, to explore such a situation.

Patricia's situation is a little different. A very bright girl, strong in math and science, her parents and teachers strongly encouraged her to pursue a career in such directions and when one encounters her in the operetta, she has a high-paying technical position with a firm specializing in digital imagery. Her first aria, in the baroque da capo style, is entitled "All my life I've been sensible" and her second is entitled "I'm good at my work."  I'm sure you get the idea.

But Patricia has just returned from her first visit to Manhattan, for an industry conference, and her eyes have opened. She wants to drop everything and go there to "search for the woman I am, shed the woman they made me untrue."

Her friend Beatrice is horrified -- an on it goes from there.

Well, I started this project well before the pandemic and I suspect Patrica would not be anxious to start over in Manhattan at the moment.  But the composition project is moving exceptionally slowly and with any luck, a vaccine will have been deployed and Manhattan back to it's familiar self, with respect to culture and the performing arts, by the time this is completed.  If not, I suppose I can set it clearly in the past as sort of a nostalgia piece.