350.2. "Pretty Woman" and "La Traviata"--wait, what?

Grazing through the channels in the wee hours when the pickings are slim, I found “Pretty Woman” (commercials and all) on the Bravo channel.  You know the one.  It’s about a rich business man who hires a hooker for a week when he needs a pretty woman on his arm.  Of course, they fall in love.  Of all the thin concepts to build a movie around, this may be the all-time thinnest.

So for me anyway, it has always been way too hard to be a fan of this 1990  movie starring Julia Roberts and Richard Gere, and directed by television’s Garry Marshall (“Happy Days” and “The Odd Couple”).  But I am a sucker for romantic comedies, which I will deny if you ever ask me in public, and this one has become a beloved classic of the genre.  So what the hey, I watched the rest of it.  

But surprise, surprise!  This time around I became a fan.  

What turned me around was the music--not Roy Orbison’s wobbly “Pretty Woman,” but Giuseppe Verdi’s “La Traviata,” the story of a prostitute who falls in love, one of the great romantic stories of opera and one of the most frequently staged of all operas.  Verdi’s glorious music ushers us into an emotionally-wrenching tragedy, not a feel-good comedy.  It’s a key distinction worth remembering.

In the movie Edward the Rich Business Man whisks Vivian the Hooker into his private jet to San Francisco to see her first opera.  He explains in his private box before the curtain that some people will get the opera experience at once and become changed by it forever.  Others can learn about it and learn to enjoy it, but they will not have their lives changed by it.

Then the glories of  the first scene of “La Traviata” begin, Verdi at his most impossible-not-to-love best.  Miss Vivian the hooker is hooked.  And so was I on the movie, on Miss Julia Roberts, even on the annoyingly good-looking Richard Gere.

I think I’ll watch it one more time.  Without commercials.

350.1: The Orlando Rays

There are about a billion Chinese who couldn’t care less, but along the I-4 corridor between Tampa and Orlando, a gathering storm seems to be taking shape over where the Tampa Bay Rays baseball team will be playing its games after 2027.

That’s the last year the Rays are obligated to play all their games at a mausoleum called Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg.  Team owners, discouraged by low attendance that is keeping them from becoming multi-billionaires, have floated the idea that the Rays might consider sharing each season with a “sister” city, Montreal.  Despite the mayhem associated with players needing two homes, dentists, pharmacies, pediatricians, currencies, car repairmen, etc., the crazy idea seems attractive to Rays’ ownership that is so perilously close to the poverty line.
      

In the midst of this brewing international intrigue has stepped one Pat Williams, who has got it into his head that the team should relocate completely (no split-season, sister-city nonsense) to his hometown, Orlando, which he says, is enjoying a growth spurt that neither Tampa nor St. Pete can compete with.  And it would be easier, he points out, to raise stadium-building money in a city that generates three times the tourist taxes than Tampa-St. Pete combined.

Tampa Bay would not be losing their team, Williams says, because it would just be moving a little to the east, that’s all.  No big deal.

Right now it’s nothing more than idle talk, so the Chinese really shouldn’t be worrying too much about how this will play out.  Williams hasn’t spoken to Orlando city officials, to Rays’ principal owner Stuart Sternberg—not even to Disney.

However, if the conversation ever got serious, it might be a good idea for Tampa mayor Jane Castor to point out that the team could move east—to the State Fairgrounds—and still be in the Tampa Bay region.  It’s half an hour east of Tropicana Field, and best of all, it’s only an hour or so west of Orlando, a short ride for Mr. Pat Williams.  No big deal.