Tonya and Nancy: The Opera

My friend Betty sent me an amusing article because she knows my work pals and I are fascinated by Tonya Harding. Tonya started at the lowest of the low, worked herself up to the highest of the high, an Olympic figure skater for God's sake and a damn good one, then in the most tawdry manner conceivable plunged herself back down into scandal and humiliation. I always felt kind of bad for her when people said stuff like "you can take the girl out of the trailer park but you can't take the trailer park out of the girl," but I understood where they were coming from cuz she's kinda skanky. Is she a comic figure or a tragic figure? And why did (do) some people still like Tonya better than Nancy even though Tonya is a criminal and Nancy is so sweet? Tonya constantly re-invents herself, nevertheless she can't seem to keep herself from backsliding just when it seems she is about to pop out on top once again. She's the archetypal tragic hero, except that she's not dead yet.

Betty's boyfriend works for the Clackamas County Courthouse, that's why Betty keeps us updated on all Tonya's activities...and Tonya is very active. She has really bad taste in men. She also has a web site.

Apparently some Tufts student has written an opera about these two women:

In "Tonya and Nancy: The Opera," Al-Doory provides 18 movements on the scandal that turned the once-dainty sport of figure skating into a soap opera of whacking, wailing and time spent in jail.


Al-Doory's goal is to make the viewers rethink their impression of Harding and Kerrigan, maybe send them away with a tune in their heads.

"Our adviser encouraged us to do a string quartet. I wanted to do something with voice and a story," Al-Doory said, 72 hours before the performance. "I really should have done a string quartet."

Leave it to a student to recognize how the traditional operatic themes of envy, greed and power can be so readily applied to a modern day drama. Nancy got whacked 12 years ago, but it seems like yesterday.