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At college in San Diego, Rosalinda Verde fell in love with opera—but she learned to love art while growing up in Visalia. “Instrumental people taught me that arts are always available here in our town,” she said. For a few years after graduation, she lived in San Diego—spinning her wheels and trying to figure out how to do art in a huge town. She decided to return home—in part for her family, and in part because she knew there would be opportunities here.

Verde asked Visalia’s Arts Consortium if she could put on an opera, and they didn’t hesitate to offer their support and encouragement. “‘If you want to do it, do it,’” she recalled hearing—a sentiment that’s been echoed throughout her arts career in Visalia. She put on a “Taste of Opera” performance, and built a local opera company from there.

Caroline Koontz, director of the Arts Consortium, credited the city and its people for making it so easy to support projects like Verde’s. “Our creative community is so collaborative and so cooperative,” she said. They possess “a spirit of giving that is really rare.” The consortium prides itself on its flexibility, which allows them to support start-up groups. Artists come to them with ideas, and then they figure out, one step at a time, what it will take to make them happen.

Richard Peterson, a lithographer and professor of art at the College of the Sequoias, was a bit less sanguine. “Government always moves way too slow for me,” he said. He pointed to zoning laws as one obstacle getting in artists’ way. Downtown Visalia doesn’t offer live/work spaces for artists. Such spaces are helpful to artists and also a draw for community members who want to meet and talk with the people whose art they’re seeing and buying.

James Ward, senior lifestyles editor of the Visalia Times-Delta and the evening’s moderator, pointed out that downtown Visalia remains much more vibrant compared to other downtowns across the Central Valley. What’s the difference?

Verde said that a few “excellent movers and shakers” have made a difference. She singled out Sound N Vision, a local nonprofit that brings bands from all over to local venues, as one of the organizations that has turned Visalia into a hub for creative people who, like her, leave for university and come back home.

Peterson added that the cultural scene at the College of the Sequoias is a big part of the city’s cultural life. College music groups play at different venues around town, and people come to the campus to see concerts as well. But he still thought there was untapped potential, particularly in the visual arts .

Peterson suggested that one way to get young visual artists integrated into the cultural life of the city would be to host an “art attack.” If Visalia invited artists into different city-owned buildings for a weekend to display their art, the city might harness the energy of many of the young artists and professors at the college.

What comes first, asked Ward—vibrant for-profit businesses or art that brings people to the businesses?

Koontz said that entertainment and culture will help Visalia and Tulare County keep talent from leaving. The people gathered in the audience for this event “can’t do much to change our air quality,” she said. “We don’t have the money in this room to build a four-year university.” But by creating a community where someone who wants to open a music studio can open a music studio, you’re building an audience for culture and for commerce, she said.

Koontz added that cultural tourists spend more money than any other kind of tourist. Someone who attends an arts event will spend an additional $34 beyond the cost of a ticket, providing a clear economic boost.

The panelists agreed there is more to do to bolster the arts in the city.

In the next five years, the Arts Consortium’s vision is to build studio spaces, triple its grant program, build an arts and education program, and move out from Visalia to support artists all around Tulare County.

Continuing to support local arts education—such as the city’s strong drama and band programs—is also key, they all agreed. Verde credited teachers in her elementary and middle schools for shaping her as a person and artist.

What kind of audiences, asked Ward, come out for the arts in Visalia?

Koontz said she was happy to see events like the recent Taste the Arts festival draw people of all ages and ethnicities, and families as well as adults.

Verde said that opera audiences do tend to be older, but she is actively working to get young people out. They’ve done zombie opera, they’re going to do drag queen opera, and they’re singing in new spaces in order to find new audiences.

In the question-and-answer session, the panelists spoke about the challenges of creating and supporting art in Visalia.

Grants are “extremely limited,” said Koontz. Tulare County is the only county she knows of that doesn’t have a community foundation making grants to local organizations. The city also currently doesn’t have a public art policy in place, which means there is very little public art. And, local organizations are all run by very small staffs—many of whom volunteer their time and all of whom are stretched thin.

Verde echoed this sentiment. She has a full-time job and a lot of other commitments; time is her greatest challenge.

Peterson said that the challenge he sees is “teaching people that without art we’d all be naked.” Artists design our clothes, our cars, our houses—everything we do—but it remains hard to convince people that they’re important.

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That’s the first line from Less Than Zero, Brett Easton Ellis’ infamous 1985 novel of alienation that paints a grim portrait of L.A. When I read it, I thought, “Well, not on every freeway”; but when it comes to Pasadena’s Arroyo Parkway, Ellis has a point. You’d have to be nuts—or suicidal—to roll fearlessly from a stop sign at the end of an entrance ramp directly into traffic zipping by at 60 mph.

The Arroyo Parkway is the oldest section of the 110 Freeway, which, in turn, is the oldest freeway in Los Angeles. What makes the parkway scary is precisely what makes it historic. It is a relic of a slower era; construction began in 1939. It marks the transition from stoplight-interrupted travel to what a 1939 promotional piece called “six glass-smooth miles to downtown.”

“Six glass-smooth miles.” The phrase haunted me. It hinted at a shimmering future, paved by technology. A hopeful future, advanced through engineering. A future that in just a few years would be mocked by the deadly high-tech weaponry of World War II.

The phrase also haunted Emmy Award-winning composer Laura Karpman, who was commissioned by the Los Angeles Opera and the National Endowment for the Arts in 2009 to write an opera pegged to the freeway’s 70th anniversary in 2010. Shannon Halwes, my former writing partner and a lyricist with whom Laura had worked, stumbled upon the phrase when she was searching for articles about the freeway. The three of us teamed up for the project and felt those words needed to be sung. This is how “six glass-smooth miles” found its way into the first aria in One-Ten, Laura’s multimedia opera about the freeway that had a workshop performance at the Pacific Asia Museum and the California African American Museum in November 2009.

The line was included in a duet sung by a pair of star-crossed lovers before their hope for a future together was crushed. They sang it in a darkened car near the freeway construction site–the sort of place where couples have sought privacy from parents since the automobile was first invented.

Laura asked me to join her opera team, I think, because I was obsessed with L.A. history. I had just published Astro Turf: The Private Life of Rocket Science, a memoir of my difficult rocket-engineer dad and a cultural history of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, where he had worked. When one spends months digging through archives and interviewing retired people, one tends to inhabit the past. It’s tough to re-enter the present, so often I didn’t. At dinner parties, I would nerd out about things I had investigated: the development of solid-propellant rocket fuel and the McCarthy-era persecution of JPL’s leftist rocket pioneers. At social gatherings, I became so dull that people ran away from me. But Laura realized that for a venture grounded in history, an encyclopedic bore might be useful.

Laura wanted to explore the idea of the freeway as a river that moved through time and space from its beginning in Pasadena to its terminus in San Pedro. The opera followed this river through the history of the regions it traversed. Because the 110 runs along the city’s eastern edge, skirting Hollywood, our story distinguished itself from shopworn depictions of L.A. that only focus on Tinseltown. The dreamers of our opera were not movie-makers, but Caltech scientists, artists linked to the groundbreaking Pasadena Museum when the legendary Walter Hopps was its director, and African-American jazz musicians who performed on South Central Avenue.

Laura astonished us with the beauty, tenderness, and sheer inventiveness of her melodies. We didn’t have a full orchestra, just a lone accompanist. But, as you can hear in the workshop recordings, the soundscape is enriched with traffic noise, ambient conversations taped during informal discussions of the freeway in different neighborhoods, and clips of historical recordings. To evoke the vernacular of the past, Laura often quoted found text–for example, a gossip column in The California Eagle, an influential African-American newspaper. In collaboration with the filmmaker Kate Hackett, Laura created movies that showed, among many images, freeway signs going by, promotional drawings of the freeway, and people commuting. This allowed the audience to move through time visually. But to get this opera right, we had to get the characters right.

Just as many types of cars merge together on the freeway, we wanted our cast to represent the diverse ethnicities that make up Los Angeles. We also wanted our characters to have grown up in the same neighborhood, which would have been unusual in 1939. Our story thus began in Boyle Heights, which was one of the few areas in L.A. that did not have racially restrictive housing covenants intended to bar people of color from buying property in largely white neighborhoods. The jinxed couple that sang the first duet lived next door to each other: Lew Zellman, an aspiring Apollo engineer, and Susan Tanaka, a budding painter. Today they might have led a charmed life. But interracial marriage was illegal in California until 1948. Worse, when the U.S. entered World War II, Susan was sent to a relocation camp, where–like real-life Japanese-American sculptor Ruth Asawa–she learned to draw from the Disney animators interned with her. The other main characters were Oscar Gutierrez, a jazz instrumentalist, and Shirley Norman, an African-American journalist hired by the real-life Charlotta Bass, who ran The California Eagle from 1912 until she was pressured to sell it in 1951.

Laura and I put a lot of our fathers into Lew Zellman. Her dad–now a cardiologist in Beverly Hills–grew up in the close-knit Jewish community in Boyle Heights. My dad the rocket engineer lived for the space race.

I made Susan Tanaka my kindred spirit. After her internment, she lives all over the world, gaining recognition as an artist. But her strongest works draw upon memories of her West Coast childhood. “On the other side of the planet / I drew the neighborhood
 I couldn’t wait to leave” she reflects in a bittersweet aria set 30 years after her love duet.

Like Susan, I fled my native Southern California for college and a job on the East Coast. But the subject matter of my two best-known books–Forever Barbie and Astro Turf–pulled me back. In the late 1990s, I moved back here from Manhattan to research the book about JPL. I didn’t plan to stay. But the city captivated me. It was so different from Los Angeles in the 1970s and ’80s. What had once seemed an entertainment industry ghetto was now a hub of art and culture–home to important museums, revolutionary architecture, and a major opera company. The city’s ethos had evolved. Like the freeway, L.A. was ever-changing, molded by time’s river into a bold new metropolis. Most astonishing, downtown, which had largely been abandoned in the 1960s, was becoming vital again.

In 2007, I bought a loft there, eager to be part of downtown’s transformation. I live near where the 5 and 10 freeways merge, not far from the Sixth Street Viaduct, a beautiful but structurally unsound bridge over the Los Angeles River. The entire bridge area has been reimagined in a $140 million plan to connect my neighborhood with Boyle Heights and make the riverbank into a landscaped waterway instead of a concrete scar. The project has stirred conflicts over money, land use, and aesthetic vision, with enough drama and heat for another urban opera.

The first community meetings were cacophonous. But as interest groups were forced to coalesce around a single idea, they grew more harmonious. And after years of construction din, auto horns, and the cursing of detoured motorists, the project will culminate in a surprising, mellifluous finale—one that merges L.A.’s present-day car noise with the sounds of its future: pedestrian footfalls (on a special, elevated walkway) and the whir of bikes (in a designated lane).

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I grew up in Visalia, singing Gloria Estefan and Selena songs at county fairs. All I wanted to do when I grew up was to be a pop singer—to shake my booty on stage and wear glittery outfits. I didn’t know the first thing about opera.

I went off to college in San Diego at Point Loma Nazarene University, where I decided to audition for the music program. I walked into the audition hall with a boom box and a Bonnie Raitt karaoke CD. I almost walked out when I realized I was supposed to have prepared a classical piece. I was unprepared and felt intimidated. Luckily, a voice teacher on the audition panel recognized that I could be molded and took me on as her student.

My professor encouraged me to audition for the San Diego Opera Company, and I was hired on as a chorus member. I was hooked. I fell in love with the stories and the sheer talent of the singers around me.

San Diego offered a lot of opportunities, but I found myself wanting to go back to Visalia. It is an arts-focused community, with an emphasis on excellence, discipline, and creativity. Even at Green Acres Middle School, our drama teacher, Susan Mathews, had treated her students as if we were experienced actors and put on amazing musicals and drama productions.

After six years of living in San Diego, I came home to Visalia, found jobs in healthcare and teaching Zumba, and plugged right into the arts. A new consortium was now connecting artists across Tulare County, and it welcomed me immediately. Some friends and I even put on a “taste of opera” performance at a consortium event. Many people in the audience said they were surprised they liked opera.

I wanted to help break down people’s misconceptions about the art form, and I knew the best way would be to present a full opera production. But how could a girl with no graduate training and such limited opera experience even think of putting on an opera?

You just do it. I had read an article about Carol Cymbala, director of the Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir. She could not read music very well, had no formal training, and doubted her qualifications for starting a choir. But she just built one anyway. The choir started with nine members but now boasts almost 300. They’ve won Grammys and performed at the most recent presidential inauguration.

I’m not Carol, but I was determined to put on an opera. In a small town, you don’t need the sprawling network of contacts that bigger places require. And while egos and issues between people are problems anywhere, it’s easier to keep them in check in a smaller place.

My friends and I decided to put on Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel at the Main Street Theatre in Visalia. Elisha Wilson served as musical director and conducted the orchestra. We recruited opera singers and ballet dancers from around the region. All of the performers and crew donated their time. I was nervous for my performance as Hansel. It was my first lead role in an opera, and I was determined to prove to myself that I could sing the role. The show did so well that we came out in the black, selling tickets for our three performances for between $10 and $25. The Visalia Opera Company had formed.

As our sponsor and umbrella 501(c)(3), the Arts Consortium of Tulare County has made our company’s existence possible. They continue to take care a lot of the legwork that goes into running a nonprofit so that I can focus on the creative side of building a company. In between full-length productions we often sing at community events to let people know that we exist. This summer, to bring opera to young people in the San Joaquin Valley, we are touring Kings County libraries with scenes from Hansel and Gretel.

My goal is to present two or three productions a year. In November 2013, we will perform Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro. I’m playing Barbarina. I had auditioned for the role of Cherubino, but my dear friend Isabel Contreras, from Fresno State University, beat me out. She deserved it.

This spring, I saw the world’s first mariachi opera in San Diego, and I fell in love. It touched both my Mexican-American roots and my love of classic music. Next year, we’d like to bring a mariachi opera to Visalia. As a first step, our company just sponsored a concert here featuring UCLA’s Mariachi de Uclatlán.

Sometimes people ask how I was able to put on opera in Visalia. I honestly can’t think of a better place. The community is incredibly generous and open to new things—even the most far-fetched endeavors. Our talent base is full of performers and teachers.

Visalia is a place where, even if all you have is a dream and a Bonnie Raitt CD, you can jump in and build something new. I’m lucky to be from here, and even luckier to be able to be back.

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