Sunrise Senior Living

Opera provides the background for some of our most beloved movies, from The Godfather to Moonstruck to, not surprisingly, the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera. Most people enjoy opera when they see it on-screen, but under other circumstances have a hard time understanding what all the fuss is about. The typical opera plot is impossibly convoluted, the libretto is in a foreign language, and the performers, more often than not, seem too old and too heavy for their roles.

From AboutSeniors - Readers' Stories

by Daphne Hargreaves

My fate was sealed twenty-one years before I was born. It was at the time of my mother's birth.

My grandmother had longed to give her first born daughter the name Daphne. Her husband would have none of it, instead the baby was named Elsie Eileen. This name, my grandfather's choice, he registered before my grandmother was discharged from hospital - she was not even a party to the naming of the baby she had just given birth to!

As my mother grew up, my grandmother told her the story of how she was named. She instilled in her daughter the desire to use the name Daphne, should she bear a daughter of her own.

Thus it was predetermined.

I was born at 6a.m.on a glorious June morning in England. The sun was shining, the birds were singing, all was well in my mother's world; Daphne had arrived. Why couldn't my father have been more assertive? It was many years later that he admitted that he didn't really like my name but since my mother was so set on it he just 'let her have her own way' or so he said.