Coda: The Performance I Can't Forget (But Wish I Could)
In the mid-1950s, my mother divorced my father and remarried. I suddenly had new relatives and a new life. With my father, an evening of entertainment consisted of watching a prizefight on the little black-and-white TV, or a walk to the candy store on the corner for some butter-pecan ice cream. The new man in my mother's life was a different sort. He was raised in a mansion on the banks of the Hudson River. His father was a multimillionaire industrialist. His mother was Viennese, and his nanny never spoke a word of English to him. German was his first and preferred language.
My mother was intent on being embraced by her new husband's family. Every Sunday, she, my stepfather and I would visit his elderly mother, who lived in a sprawling apartment on a high floor of the Mayflower Hotel overlooking Central Park. My mother and I wore white gloves and pretty hats, and I curtseyed to Grandmother Hortense. We sat quietly while her live-in companion, another Viennese widow, poured tea and sliced a tiny cake. The apartment was hushed and filled with strange Victorian knickknacks, my favorite being a tea tray made of iridescent butterfly wings, my least favorite a creepy umbrella stand made from a real elephant foot.
As the only child of older parents I was used to the company of adults. I was expected not to spill things, to keep my voice modulated and to speak only when spoken to. It sounds extreme now, but well-bred urban children did that sort of thing back then. I would sit quietly on the couch reading a Bobbsey Twins book while the grown-ups chatted. It was no one's job to keep me amused.
What I did not expect to enter my life was opera. My new grandmother had two passions — her tiny, pampered pet dog and somebody called Wagner. As I soon learned, she was an opera fiend, and because my stepfather always did as his mother wished, and because my mother (having graduated as a pianist from Juilliard) was eager to fit into the new family, no one saw any reason why I should not be included when Wagner was being performed at the Met.
It would be nice to say that having been exposed so early to opera left me with a great appreciation for the art form. It would be nice, but it also would be a big fat lie. The truth is that being subjected against my will to hours of Wagnerian opera left me with a hair trigger that to this day launches me into a full-scale paroxysm of terror at the very word "Valkyrie."
At eight years old, when the lights dimmed at the Met and the heavy stage curtain began to lift, I felt my fate being sealed. It would be hours and hours of watching bombastic women singing in a language I did not understand, accompanied by oddly costumed men pacing the stage and frothingwith indecipherable drama. It was like being in the dark at a house of horrors, where I lost any sense of time and place. Leaving never occurred to me; it was not something a well-brought-up child in the 1950s would do.
So I sank deep into myself. I played with the smocking on my dress, I examined my patent-leather Mary Janes in the dark. I made sure my ankle socks were 100 percent even. Smothered by the oppressive rules of good opera manners — no unwrapping candy, no squirming in my seat, no turning around to look at people in the rows behind me through the mother-of-pearl-covered opera glasses — I sat and sat and swore that when I was a grown-up I would never see another opera as long as I lived.
Now the irony of life is that we become what we most fear. A few years ago, I was at the local hardware store in the small town in Connecticut where I live. While I was buying nuts or bolts or something along that line, a meek-looking man in the next aisle kept staring at me. I paid no attention and walked to the cash register, where he approached me. "I am so sorry to bother you," he stammered, "but I am a great fan of yours." I looked at him, and he did not look anything like one of our Roadfood readers, a big happy bunch of well-fed folks wearing BBQ rib-stained T-shirts and shorts. "May I have your autograph?" he asked, handing me a slip of paper. I put down the hardware I was holding and wrote, "Best wishes from one foodie to another — Jane Stern." He looked puzzled. "Wait a minute," he said, "you are not the person I thought you were, but wow — it is uncanny how much you look like her." I asked for her name, which I didn't recognize when he said it. "Who is she?" I asked, to which he replied haughtily, "Only one of the most famous opera singers on the planet." He dropped the piece of paper I had autographed on the floor and walked away.
It was a defining moment and the first of a number of times I would be asked this same question by strangers. Somehow I did grow up to look like an opera singer, more specifically a Wagnerian opera singer, from my statuesque barrel chest to my classical profile and long hair skimmed back in a braid. It is almost as if I had an invisible horned helmet on my head.
Recently, I tried to compose a personal ad on a dating website. I read through adjectives used by other single gals who declared themselves to be "sporty," "perky," "toned" or "slender." "Describe your looks," said the instructions on the site. I took a deep breath and slowly started to type in "Valkyrian." 
JANE STERN is a food writer who worked at Gourmet magazine for eighteen years and is now at Saveur. She and her partner, Michael Stern, run a popular food and travel website called Roadfood.
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