And speaking of the Recent Unpleasantness, the excellent Billevesées brings some insider knowledge to the ongoing discussion, specifically the relationship among the Met, the Guild and Opera News.

And now… a song dedicated to the star of yesterday’s news cycle.

Daniel Wakin

The blog post in question, by critic Olivia Giovetti, is in large part a rebuttal to Gelb’s interview with Anthony Tommasini, which in turn was transparently a response to the Alex Ross‘s harsh critique of Lepage’s production in The New Yorker.

Though, as Wakin notes, Giovetti’s post has been scrubbed from the WQXR site, a cached version can be viewed here as a PDF. La Cieca invites the cher public to decide for themselves whether the piece was inflammatory enough to provoke an act of what can only be called censorship.

EARLIER: The events, as they happened, on Out West Arts’s Twitter.

10:45 PM: La Cieca hears that a demonstration of some kind happened at the Met at the end of the first intermission of Faust tonight. Information is sketchy at this time: “A man began shouting ‘Occupy Wall Street’ repeatedly immediately b4 the start of Act III @MetOpera ‘s Faust tonight,” says one witness; another reports “At the Metropolitan Opera: Occupy Wall street disrupts the beginning of act two of Faust, booed by the audience they were quickly escorted out . . . OWS being escorted off of Lincoln Center property.”

“You ought to go to someone.”

La Cieca knows that when plots are in question, she need go no farther than the cher public, which is why she’s reminding you (late in the game, admittedly) of the annual Omniscient Mussel #Operaplot Competition. No, it’s no Nancy Blake wisecrack, my dears, read on!

What you do, darlings, is: “Summarize an opera in 140 characters or less.” There’s more to it, of course, as you will see when you view the rules and regulations on Miss Mussel‘s website. Happy tweeting!

Loyal parterrian Jondrytay (not pictured) looked in on the Royal Opera’s Anna Nicole and shared this thoughts on his blog Not So Wunderbar.

What La Cieca thinks is going to live as the definitive take on John Adams‘ Nixon in China at the Met is sitting there, just waiting for you to read it, at Daniel Stephen Johnson.

Just to make the conversation a bit more interesting, La Cieca is offering complimentary copies of Joyce DiDonato‘s Diva, Divo CD to the three best responses left on Ivy’s site in response to her post.

Actually, it’s not quite as horrific as what happened to poor Lauren Bacall—by which I mean starring in this stinkeroo:

Among such other must-haves as The Metropolitan Opera Centennial Gala (“Essential James Levine Moment”) and Franco Zeffirelli‘s 1983 film  (“Essential Opulent Traviata”), Opera Chic’s work is lauded as “like that of a dedicated and informed adolescent fan” who “goes against the current of snarky one-liners often found on opera blogs, writing from a vantage point of admiration, not disdain.” (La Cieca is confident the Chic will be broad-minded enough to swallow a large dose of condescension with this terrific publicity.)

Says M. Mantle:

The site which was (and still is) unabashedly directed towards gays in New York owned a certain in your face gossipy style so very favoured by this crowd. Parterre’s readers consisted predominately of those particular effeminate men who loved to ape their sexuality in any outlandish form which suited the second in which they lived: thus Parterre fit perfectly within their scope.

Now, it’s hardly news to La Cieca that you, the cher public, are mostly “gays,” and who could dispute the obvious fact that you are (generally speaking) “effeminate men who [love] to ape their sexuality.”

Where Mama Grizzly Cieca draws the line, though, is in calling you “particular.” Anyone who knows the cher public can tell you that they are the least particular creatures in the world—after all, they read La Cieca, don’t they?

Ah, well, as dear André Gide said to Truman Capote that one time in Tangiers, “The dogs bark but the caravan moves on”