JUNE: Tosca (Telephone Tag)

September 15, 2003 7:28 a.m.

You are my Cecilia Sophia Anna Maria Kalogeropoulos and this is Milan. You are songbird, you are streaks of beauty that escape your lips. You talk about the real, the deep, the mundane and everything is magic.

You talk and I cannot. You are more than a voice, you are an enchantress; your words are three-dimensional. I eat your turns of phrase.

This is me sitting on a staircase outsde an abandoned construction site-turned art gallery by graffitti artists, smoking a cigarette and talking on my mobile with someone I have never met.

That is you sitting in your living-room looking out the windows into the wild expanse of Japan, smoking a cigarette in a long green kimono, your hair cascading almost-auburn down your back.

Your voice has a flawed timbre that oscillates with color as you describe your world. You race from soprano to mezzo without batting an eye.

As we speak I picture myself as Scarpia making a terrible proposal to you in the second act of a modern Rome between Pacific islands, your beloved Cavaradossi torn far from you.

Yes, you are my Maria Callas and this is Japan, fifty years later. Yet somehow, this opera is beyond anything Puccini could have ever conjured.

Inspired by the voice of Anais and written by June.