Opening Night Dispatch: Lyric Opera of Chicago,

Here's the full story. 

In a hurry-up, rush-rush, cell-phone-to-the-ear world, Lyric Opera of Chicago's Opening Night Gala Performance and Ball is a charmed interlude when time slows to an early-twentieth-century pace, pomp and formality reign and the core of the city's Establishment gathers to support and celebrate a beloved institution with a magnificent event produced by Lyric's Women's Board. The annual ritual began last Saturday afternoon before 5:00 with limousines lining up in front of the Civic Opera House on Wacker Drive, where elegantly dressed couples stepped out onto a red carpet before a performance of Carmen.Once again, it was the Chicago of Mary Garden, Samuel Insull and Edith Rockefeller McCormick - well, maybe not quite. At last year's Lyric Opening, ultra-chic Women's Board member Katherine Harvey arrived on the red carpet wearing a superb black strapless John Galliano gown, impeccable in every detail - except that around its waist was not Edith McCormick's diamond stomacher but a denim jeans jacket. "It was a Dior jeans jacket," insists Mrs. Harvey, whose composer husband, Julian, descends from the Fred Harvey who smartened up railway depot dining along the "Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe," as sung by Judy Garland in the 1946 Hollywood film "The Harvey Girls." 

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