Opera, Anyone?

My wife and I frequent a small town in Michigan where there is a fine theater and good restaurants; a relaxing weekend away from everything. I won't mention the name of the place, not because they shouldn't get the publicity, but because we don't want any more competition than we already have. As it turns out, the local public library has a wonderful book sale every month during the theater season, and we time our trips to the theater to coincide with this additional event. Clever, we are.

This last trip turned out to be beyond expectations. While the play was excellent, and the food at one restaurant was accompanied by a performance by a delightful local folksinger, the highlight was the book sale. Normally, at $5 per bag, it's hard to beat. However, we encountered an unusual happenstance (can you tell I've been reading British mysteries lately?). The library had obtained the sound recordings from an estate. Sadly, and elderly someone had passed in the community, and the library was on the receiving end of the castoffs, including hundreds of CDs, mostly opera, but some old-fashioned jazz and other music as well. After culling what they wanted for the collection, the rest ended up in the book sale. Hundreds. They didn't think the stuff would move very fast, and so they priced the discs at 25 cents each.

Now I'm not greedy (hah!), but I proceeded to fill two paper shopping bags with CDs. Most of the material was older, historic operas reissued on CD and sets of arias by older artists--Renata Tebaldi, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Maria Callas. I know my library had virtually none of these, and so the stuffing of bags began. After I got home, I estimated that the cost of the booty at their prices was in the ballpark of $50, and at any reasonable sale, the 180 or so recordings would have cost around that figure in dollars.

But wait, there's more! The elderly gentleman (I use the terms to indicate that he was older than me, and also very nice) at the checkout counter did not care to be bothered to count up the CDs. Just too much work. So he simply said, "Two bags of CDs and a bag of books? How about $10?" My wife and I were aghast. We told him that that figure was unacceptable, and handed him a $20 bill, saying that "Here. It's for the Friends of the Library." Then we got the hell out of there as fast as we could, like thieves in the night, even though it was 11 AM. I didn't have space to count up all the CDs until I got home late the next day, when I discovered what a bargain I had.

Now I am listening to opera singers at home, comparing their voices, and discovering that I prefer Schwarzkopf to Tebaldi, but Kirsten Flagstad is also very fine. After a listen or two, they go off to the library for cataloging, as we continue to build a monstrously large CD collection for a small college library. Oh, there was some old jazz too.

Tough business.