Maria Callas Diet

*Loving* the BBC special I'm watching right now on "The Tigress" opera diva Maria Callas.

Just wanted to say that she went from obese to slim in about two seconds and you know her secret? Steak tartare :) aka: a tapeworm from uncooked meat.

I'm going to go lick the streets in Cairo's butchery district now,* and pray for a tapeworm. By the way -- the "name that worm" competition I had more than a month ago on this blog? The answer was tapeworm. It's like a Veiled Chunk leitmotif!

"All my tears can never bring his love to me" (name that opera!) ended up being all too true for Callas, though, and I have to say that hearing her speak about her pursuit of Onassis -- who totally chose Jackie Kennedy over her -- reminds me a lot of my early romantic decisions (how's THAT for narcissism?). You work and work for someone (in my case an Evil Russian, in her case a Greek billionaire...ok so I should have set the bar higher lol) and then you look back on the isolation and secrecy and everything you lost (basically your life) and are both stunned by your own stupidity and loss of power and devastated by all that you didn't end up with combined with all that you lost. Good thing I moved on...she didn't. It sounds like people like to depict her death two years after Onassis died as the tragic (but strong-willed) female following her life pursuit to the grave. I don't know about that. I think that suicide happens when you really feel yourself to be removed from the system...like almost physically -- like you could die and literally EVERYTHING in the world would go on as it did before...you only kill yourself when you feel you've already ceased to exist (this is my impression). In any case, I'd like to think that her death was something more sublime than the willed-suicide of a tortured woman frustrated by lost love and a faded career, but why should anyone focus on hero (or in this case: heroine) narratives around her death, when she obviously was a legend in life. Personally I don't care how or why she died when I hear the high E she hit in Mexico singing in Aida -- either Onassis nor cracked-voice performances during a short London comeback can take that from her (let's hope Martina Hingis remembers that if things don't go so well for her).

Wow -- from tapeworms to suicide to Swiss tennis players. I'm really all over the place!

Off to have coffee with a Syrian film critic who lives nearby. The things I'll do for a visa ;p (kidding!).

VC

*There is no such thing, as far as I know, as a Cairene butchery district, and if there were, I certainly wouldn't know where it would be found.