Good evening, or good morning, depending on when you find me. My name is Dorothy Thoma. I'm fifty-two years old, and for the last nineteen years I have been the overnight switchboard operator at a hospital in Hartford, Connecticut. Eleven at night to seven in the morning, five nights a week. I'm the voice that answers when you call at three in the morning, and I'm the one who pages the doctor on call. Nobody ever sees me. I like it that way, mostly.

I have seen The Phantom of the Opera fourteen times. Thirteen on Broadway and one in Toronto. Yes, fourteen. My brother-in-law has been to more Red Sox games than that and nobody asks him what's wrong with him.

My First Time

A nurse on the evening shift lent me her cassette of the London cast album in the fall of 1988, and I played it on the little tape player at the switchboard every night for a month, very quietly, between calls. By Christmas I'd worn it out and bought my own. My sister Rosa said that if I was going to be like that about it, we might as well go see the thing.

Getting tickets in those days took months. We sat in the back of the mezzanine at a Saturday matinee on April 8, 1989, and I don't think I breathed for the first ten minutes.

It begins quietly, with an auction on the stage of an old, empty opera house, years after the story happens. Odd lots under dust sheets. An old man in a wheelchair bidding on a music box. And then the auctioneer gets to the chandelier, and the sheet comes off, and the organ starts up so loud you feel it in your seat, and the chandelier rises up off the stage and over the audience, all the way up to the ceiling, blazing. Rosa grabbed my arm. I grabbed hers. By intermission we had both cried twice and we hadn't even gotten to the sad part.

On the train home Rosa said, "Well, that's that." I said, "That's what you think." I bought my second ticket the next week.

Why I Keep Going

People ask me this, sometimes nicely and sometimes not. Here is the honest answer.

The music. I'm not a musical person. I can't read a note. But that score goes straight through me. The organ. The big rising melodies. The way a tune you heard in the first act comes back in the second and means something different. I hear something new every time, and I've heard it a great many times.

The chandelier. Every time. Every single time, I hold my breath when it goes up. And I know exactly what it's going to do at the end of the first act, and I still jump.

It's a love story, but it's really about loneliness. A man nobody can stand to look at, who lives under the opera house in the dark, and listens, and loves music more than anyone above ground does. He does terrible things, and the show doesn't excuse them. But I understand him a little. I've spent nineteen years as a voice in the night that nobody ever sees. I'm not saying I'd drop a chandelier on anybody. I'm saying I understand.

It's a night out that belongs to me. I take the early train, I walk up from the station, I have a cup of tea somewhere, and then for three hours nobody needs anything from me. Every working woman should have something like that. Mine happens to involve a mask and an underground lake.

The Show

I never saw Michael Crawford or Sarah Brightman in it. By the time I got my first ticket, they had both left the Broadway company. I have the cast album, and I've made my peace with it.

My Fourteen Nights

All fourteen, from the ticket stubs in my dresser drawer. (Some of them were afternoons, but "My Fourteen Nights" sounds better, and I work nights, so I'm allowed.) I don't list who played what. Casts change, and I didn't always keep my programs, and I'd rather not get anybody's name wrong.

Number fifteen is planned for my birthday next August, if I can trade the shifts. If anyone would like to go with me, write. I am very good company and I don't sing along.

The Novel and the Musical

After my third time I went to the library and borrowed Gaston Leroux's novel, the one the show comes from. It came out as a serial in a Paris newspaper and then as a book in 1910, and in English the next year. I expected a love story. I got something much stranger: half detective story, half ghost story, full of trapdoors and secret passages, and told by a narrator who swears up and down that every word of it is true.

The musical keeps the bones of it, the opera house, the lake under it, Christine and Raoul, the Angel of Music, the chandelier, the masked ball, the opera the Phantom writes. And it leaves out a good deal, including a whole character who might be the most interesting person in the book. I wrote it all up on its own page: The Book and the Show.

Phantom Etiquette

After fourteen performances I have opinions. I am sorry if this sounds like a lecture. It is a lecture.

1. Do not sing along. Not loudly, not softly, not under your breath. You did not pay all that money to hear yourself, and neither did the woman next to you. I know the words too. I keep them to myself.
2. No humming, either. Especially during the overture. You know who you are.
3. Unwrap your cough drops before the lights go down. A cough drop being unwrapped one crackle at a time during the quiet parts is the loudest sound in New York.
4. Leave your camera at home. No pictures in the theater. The ushers mean it.
5. Never tell a first-timer about the chandelier. Never. Let them have it the way you had it.
6. Stay for the bows. Don't climb over people to beat the crowd to the street. The cast just gave you everything. Give them five minutes.
7. If you cry, cry quietly. Bring tissues. Everyone around you is crying too, so you're in good company.
8. Dress up a little, if you like. Nobody makes you. But it's a night at the opera, more or less.

For reviews of everything else on Broadway this season, take a look at Theo's Theater Page, by a standing-room regular. Standing room! My feet hurt just thinking about it.