Opera from the Latin words "ope" - meaning "squeal loudly" - and "ra" - meaning "then die", is something you either love or hate. My Dad loved it. He'd listen all day to squealing and dying in foreign languages, not in the least put out by the fact that he had no idea what was happening. The CD could loop several times and he'd remark nothing, except maybe the unusual length of this particular piece and the author's astute use of repetition. Then he'd go out and milk the cows with a smile on his face, a brilliant conductor of a bovine orchestra. My mother, listening to the same piece of music, would conclude that it was "total shite". Then she'd go out to feed the calves with a scowl on her face. How the calves, poor hungry things, hated opera night.

I had the opportunity to go and judge for myself this weekend. I'd seen opera nights on TV before and everybody was very well presented, the style on display being second only to the most stylish event in a rural catholic boy's life - eleven o'clock mass on Sunday. But this was California and I thought, surely, if they wear ghastly Hawaiian shirts to business meetings, they'd be casual at opera too. Well, as I rounded the corner on my way to the ticket booth, I realised just how wrong I was. This was beyond anything I'd ever seen at mass, even a protestant one. You see, all my previous exposures to opera were followed immediately by a bout of agricultural labour. The fact that I wasn't wearing Wellington boots and crusty overalls made me fear that I might be gloatingly overdressed. I needn't have worried. There was a woman with flowers woven into her hair, suggesting that either her stylist had repressed landscaping tendencies, or she had fallen into a hedge. Most of the men wore tuxedos, except for one wearing a silver suit that glistened only marginally less than his date's teeth. I joined the queue sheepishly, in keeping with the agricultural theme.

When I got to the ticket booth, I'm certain the teller expected I was there to clean the toilets. With my shirt. I handed him twenty dollars. "You a student?" he asked.
"No. Why?"
"Just wondering why you gave me a twenty," he said, holding it up like a rag. "Nothing smaller," I announced proudly, knowing that those around me would empathise with the difficulty of getting change for unusually large notes. "Sir, tickets range from forty to one hundred dollars." This guy was professional, you have to give him that. He was dealing with a person who expected to see opera for twenty dollars, and yet he called me "Sir". "Look buddy," I said, "just get me to hell in."

Many stairs later I surveyed the stage as Edmund Hillary might have surveyed base camp. I was tempted to plant the Irish flag. A small man walked on stage and smiled. His lips moved and he departed. Sometime later I heard what he said (in short, "Hello. Opera is great."), along with applause from the posh people up front.

The show started. Some tiny female figures trotted on and began squealing. Their breasts, even from 300 yards, were clearly enormous. The pervert in front of me had no need for his binoculars. Looking at these women's breasts heaving, as everybody clearly was, one could only conclude that sopranos must sing using the same principle as bagpipes. Some large men entered (stage left) and, powered by bulbous stomachs, alternated between squealing and grunting. All was accompanied with wild and dramatic arm movement. This continued for ten minutes, the participants stopping only occasionally, and briefly, to re-inflate themselves.

I had no idea what was going on. I didn't even know what language I was listening to until I heard the words "je t'aime". Then I knew I was really screwed because I know very little Italian. It was unlikely that the words "Spaghetti" or "Bolognese" were going to work their way naturally into an opera plot. So I resigned myself to being screamed at for an hour by foreigners. The last time that happened I was shagging an Egyptian. I suspected this experience would not be as pleasant. And certainly not as cheap.

To make things worse, the woman beside me started laughing. As if she understood the plot. This pissed me off. Such pretence, I thought, could only mean she's insecure. Then I began worrying that her insecurity might make her dislike me. So I decided to keep her under surveillance. Like many people, I fall victim to the belief that rolling my eyes to the side while keeping my head straight allows me to observe people undetected. All you have to do is move slowly, taking care that the flash of your eye-whites doesn't give you away. I perfected this while sitting beside girls on the school bus. So, a moment later, eye muscles at breaking point, I was able to see the woman and the three rows behind me. She was smiling (smugly of course), but she wasn't looking at the stage. I tracked her line of vision and only then did I see it, the source of her insight: a screen towards the ceiling, and the storyline in English beamed onto it. As the stars sang, the words appeared on the screen, like a karaoke bar for toffs. I felt like an idiot. Pretty much how I felt actually, when I learned that to the girls on the school bus, I was not the sex symbol I thought I was, but "the one with scary eyes". I was left with only one option to alleviate my feeling of foolishness: use my new knowledge to make fun of the guy beside me.

I didn't like him. He kept pushing my elbow off the armrest we shared, even though I was there first. So I laughed. I laughed at anything even remotely funny I saw on-screen. Sometimes I made a point of laughing in his general direction, letting him feel the full effect of sitting beside two such intellectual linguists. But, knowing that I didn't look that smart, he was soon prompted to locate the screen himself, and my fun ended.

Then there was nothing much left to entertain me except the opera itself. Several minutes of squealing and gesturing would pass and then the words "This is your mother!" would appear on-screen, all the preceding drama reduced to an exclamation mark. This would lead to a tirade of bellowing and extravagant finger wagging from another character, summarized with the words "I think not!" Then both characters would draw a knife, each mortally offended at the other's insolence, to engage in much prancing, swash buckling and slashing of shirts. The screen would say '!!!!!!!!!', the textual equivalent of an action scene. Finally one would fall to the other's blow and spend five minutes dying, at which point the victor would plant a foot on the slain man's chest and spend a further five minutes saying "I say she is!" The curtain would fall to a scene of lovers embracing.

Let me say I really enjoyed this opera. But don't let me say that I had the experience the author intended, given that my exposure to the plot was limited to about twenty sentences of simplified English. I would be more comfortable saying that I experienced great music and a love story written by a ten year old. And that's good enough for me, so I applauded so hard I beat off my fingerprints. And then, stepping into the crisp night air, suits all around me and stars above me, the sounds of Carmen singing in my heart, I dusted off my overalls and went in search of some farm work.