The tension heightens as the curtain prepares to drop on the final scene of Madama Butterfly. Then the TV screen goes black, prompting exasperated responses from the viewers.

It’s just another meeting of the tremendously popular opera club at Linden Ponds, and the group’s leaders are working their magic to encourage people to attend a full showing of this month’s featured opera.

“Music! Words! Opera!”
A gathering for learning, discussing, and reminiscing, the opera club “Music! Words! Opera!” meets monthly to discuss a particular opera, with help from organizers Ruth Beyer, Victor Coronella, and Gina Herron.

“We’re doing this for people who are opera fanatics and others who don’t  know beans about opera,” says Beyer, who was president of the Indianapolis Opera Guild and a high school English and world literature teacher. “A real fanatic wants to bring others in.”

The group’s leaders are doing just that. Herron heads up organizational and  publicity  efforts. Beyer and Coronella guide analyses of the operas and present just enough video clips to whet the group’s appetite before screening the entire performance in the Linden Ponds performing arts center later in the month.

First time for everything
“The great thing about Linden Ponds is trying things for the first time,” says Helen Seager, a member of the opera club who also runs the community’s Chapel Chorale.

Despite the group’s varying knowledge of opera, discussion is lively during and after the meetings, which generally draw between 30 and 50 people.

In the recent discussion of Madama Butterfly, Beyer asked the group to think about the symbolic names of characters like Sharpless, Trouble, and, of course, Butterfly (the Japanese girl who marries an American naval lieutenant). After the opera club’s meeting, group members derided the lieutenant, who betrays Butterfly in the story.