I'm half-asleep, but I've been thinking about blogging about this for a few/several days now.
Last weekend, I met up with some people I had found through Facebook to go see our former fifth-grade (for them, she was sixth-grade) teacher. She's a little old lady now and there may be more for me to write about her some other time, but during the visit, the other two women who'd been her students and I were talking about the school and other teachers there and one of the other women mentioned a story about someone, a boy who had been doing some singing...and I immediately said "Robert Puleo?" And she said yes, that's who it was. (I'm not repeating the story--if he ever found this blog, I'm sure he'd be grateful--it's just too embarrassing even just to hear about it 40-some-odd years later, never mind having had to live through it.)
Anyway, we talked about him for a couple of minutes. I told them that Robert had been my co-star in a play I'd written when I was 13--actually, he may only have been in the following year's play that I wrote (this was a summer school production, nothing major) and that I knew his mother was a voice teacher and he was singing opera. And we wondered what had happened to him and I said I'd tried Googling him with no success in the past.
A few days after the visit, I tried again. And came up with an old NY Times article written about his being a washed up opera star at the age of 15--because, yes, that's when his voice changed. A little further Googling turned up that he's apparently written an opera or two, but nothing very substantial.
And then I tried Youtube. There's two videos of Robert, both of them apparently taken the same place/time. It's a restaurant on Thanksgiving and in one he's singing "O Sole Mio," a song I've never much liked--and I couldn't even finish listening to this version.
He's got a two (or three) piece band behind him, but for the next #, it seems he went with some canned music, which poses some technical issues at first, not least of which because the restaurant crowd isn't paying any attention. The song is "Nessun Dorma" and Googling tells me this is from Puccini's Turandot. And it's beautiful and after a rocky start, the audience starts paying attention until by the end they're cheering and clapping like mad--he totally wins them over. And it's a wonderful performance and it's stayed with me and I wanted to blog about it. I don't know where else to write about it--maybe I'll find someone else to tell, too.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=askDz8DFYbM
