By Mike Leidemann
Advertiser Staff Writer

My theory is that life imitates opera.

Which helps explains why I didn't really mind that this year's opening day of the Hawai'i Opera Theater season fell on Super Bowl Sunday.

Sure, I would have like to have stayed home watching the game with a big bowl of guacamole and chips, but a man's got to do what he's got to do, and when you've spent $90 for opera tickets ordered up months in advance, you've got to go to the opera at the appointed hour, which in this case was just about the time Janet Jackson was publicly exposing herself to 140 million or so other men, something I wasn't really interested in seeing except for the fact that so many people were talking about it the next morning.

But then, life is hard. So is opera.

Do you think Otello wanted to kill his beloved Desdemona? Do you think she wanted to die at the hands of a jealous maniac? Of course not. That's just the way it is in the wonderful world of opera. They had to do what they had to do, and I had to go see it, Super Bowl or not.

I wasn't alone. There must have been several thousand other men in the Blaisdell Concert Hall on Sunday.

As far as I could tell by scanning the crowd through my opera glasses, not one of them was using a little radio earphone to follow the action in Houston; no one ran to the car to check on the score at the end of Act 1, which coincided with the start of the fourth quarter; and there wasn't a Carolina or New England jersey or cap in the entire sold-out crowd, all of which is an astounding testament to the fact that, despite some popular misconceptions, not all men are beer-drinking, sports-loving louts.

I'll admit that my mind wandered sometimes, which I'm sure the old-timers like Verdi and Puccini intended. Why else would they put on a four-hour production that can always be synopsized in one paragraph? Anyway, as soon as the lights went down, I began trying to figure out how my own life imitates opera.

We've all known a powerfully handsome Otello who ultimately provides his own undoing. We all seen at one time or other a beautiful and talented Desdemona who is going to be betrayed. And just about every office or family has its own creepy little Iago who goes around whispering untruths and planting the seeds of distrust and misgiving in pursuit of nothing more than his own self-importance. The only role I couldn't fill was the one for myself.

Then I discovered the chorus, where the vast majority of us belong. We're not heroes or villains, not even supernumeraries. Instead, we're the really important people in the big theatrical equation of life, the ones who pay our money to sit and watch, and occasionally break out into song or laughter.

In the end, it's the only real role to play, whether you're going to the Super Bowl, the opera or the UH baseball game, which was just entering the ninth inning when Otello ended and we turned on the car radio for the long drive home.

Reach Mike Leidemann at 525-5460 or mleidemann@honoluluadvertiser.com.