Good morning. It’s Wednesday. Today we’ll meet two performers in Mozart’s “Così Fan Tutte.” One of them coils herself around the other in Act II. We’ll also get details on a $131.5 million settlement for DoorDash delivery workers.
She has her own dressing room. It’s just across the hall from the mezzo-soprano she is appearing with at the Metropolitan Opera.
She has an understudy, even though she does not vocalize when they are onstage together in Mozart’s “Così Fan Tutte.” And she can change her one and only costume without assistance from the Met’s wardrobe staff.
She is a boa constrictor. Her name is Princess. The mezzo, Samantha Hankey, asked to work with her rather than the puppet snake that the Met had planned to wrap around her in Act II, when she is to sing an aria that characterizes love as “a little serpent.”
The opening tonight will be a big moment for both of them. It will be the first time that Hankey has appeared as Dorabella in “Così” at the Met, although she has sung the role with other companies, including the Royal Opera in London in 2024.
And it will be the first time that Princess has appeared at the Met in any role. This “Così” is a revival of Phelim McDermott’s production from 2018. Cupcake, the snake that the Met called on then, has retired. Her daughter, Nala, is Princess’s understudy.
Princess is big: She is 6 feet 7 inches long and weighs 48 pounds. That’s just under the economy-class weight limit for checked luggage on most airlines, or slightly more than two small microwave ovens.
Coiled around Hankey, Princess didn’t squeeze hard during a meet-up in Princess’s dressing room. Her tongue was darting in and out — a sign that she was “exploring” the room and the people in it, said Nancy Novograd, who runs the agency that provides animals for the Met. She said the dressing-room mirror “might be confusing for her.”
“Seeing another snake that looks just the same,” Hankey said, as Princess settled in around her shoulders. Princess seemed comfortable in her own skin, though she missed one rehearsal because she was changing it — literally. She was molting.
Hankey said that she had felt “a little conflicted, working with live animals,” but that Princess’s handlers and the Met had worked to ensure the ones in “Così” were well looked after. And Princess won her over immediately.
Onstage, Hankey said, she would defer to Princess, improvising as necessary. “You have no idea what position she’s going to wrap herself in and where that will change your center of gravity or the breathing.” Zoe Ziegfeld, Princess’s handler, will be onstage, too, and can signal if she thinks Princess doesn’t want Hankey to take her when it’s time for the aria.
Princess is so long that Ziegfeld “will have the front half and I will have the other half,” Hankey said. “It divides the weight pretty nicely.”
Nala, the understudy, and Princess “definitely have distinctive personalities,” Hankey said. Nala “was a little more apprehensive, slow to warm up to the new faces, new people in the room,” she said. “Princess is very chill.”
McDermott blasted “Così” from 18th-century Naples to mid-20th-century Coney Island, with real carnies breathing fire or swallowing knives — and principals with slicked-down hair, wearing leather jackets and jeans. “Think ‘Grease’ remade by Fellini,” my colleague Corey Kilgannon wrote when the production opened in 2018.
Hankey said Mozart would have liked the idea of a live snake. But what if Princess didn’t like the aria?
“Apparently snakes don’t have ears,” she said.
Weather
Expect partly sunny conditions and temperatures near 68. Tonight will be mostly clear with a low around 55.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until Saturday (Sukkot).
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“The truth is that we don’t know who owns it. So we own it now.” — Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, referring to a 54-pound meteorite from Mars that Sotheby’s auctioned for $5.3 million last year. Federal agents later seized it from Sotheby’s, saying that whoever had brought it into the United States had not declared it to customs.
The latest New York news
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Annual chaos: The U.N. General Assembly floods the city each year with big names, black cars and S.U.V.s. But it also means traffic, closed streets, protests and a little more chaos than usual on the East Side of Manhattan between First and Second Avenues.
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Trading public barbs: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, who is expected to address the General Assembly tomorrow, falsely accused Mayor Zohran Mamdani of supporting Hamas after CNN broadcast clips of an interview in which the mayor again called him a war criminal.
In other news …
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Ocasio-Cortez on 2028: Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat whose district includes parts of the Bronx and Queens, discussed the electoral equations she is crunching and the mental “math” she is calculating as she decides whether to run for president. The decision is clearly weighing on her.
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A vote to unionize: Local 1199 of the Service Employees International Union said it had enough signatures to trigger a vote to add nearly 190,000 members to its rolls — caregivers who often work alone in homes, looking after people with significant medical needs.
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The N.Y.C. Marathon route is changing: For the first time in 15 years, runners will follow a slightly different route in the Bronx. This is to reduce the impact on Mott Haven residents, restore access to a supermarket and reduce the number of turns the marathoners take.
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A kaleidoscopic fever dream: In the 1960s, having discovered a deep affection for neon lights, the sculptor Stephen Antonakos transformed his SoHo loft into a kaleidoscopic fever dream. He lived and worked there until his death in 2013.
A $131.5 million settlement for DoorDash workers
“We screwed up,” the online delivery company DoorDash said in a statement after agreeing to pay $131.5 million to workers it underpaid or did not pay at all.
The money was part of a settlement with New York City that also calls for closer monitoring of DoorDash’s payment methods. The company said that it believed its approach to calculating the appropriate pay for its workers, whom it calls Dashers, was “fair, practical and legal,” but that “rather than spend years fighting over whose method was right, we chose to pay Dashers sooner and use the city’s method going forward.”
DoorDash said the median payment to workers amounted to around $48. Samuel Levine, the commissioner of the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, said that a handful of workers would receive more than $10,000 each. DoorDash said that about $83 million would go to workers for time they spent logged into the company’s app between deliveries.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani said that workers deserve to be paid the wages they had earned immediately — “not tomorrow, not after a lawsuit, but on time and in full.” He also said the settlement showed that “no corporation is above the law.”
City officials started investigating DoorDash in 2023 after couriers complained about missing wages to the Workers Justice Project, a labor rights organization. The group contacted the consumer agency. The city concluded that DoorDash had not paid thousands of workers at all, had failed to pay thousands more on time and had underpaid others.
METROPOLITAN diary
Squeezed In
Dear Diary:
I had managed to squeeze my car into a tight parking spot near my Upper West Side apartment. I was preparing for an upcoming road trip, and I returned a half-hour later to determine whether I could fit my bike in the back.
A young man approached me.
Is this your car, he asked.
Yes, I said.
Well, he said, you scratched my bumper. He pointed out the damage.
I apologized profusely.
It’s OK, he said. I see you are an older woman. I get it. If you were some jerk banging my bumper, I would get mad.
I feel terrible, I said. I pulled two $20 bills from my wallet.
Go buy yourself a nice lunch, I said.
Nah, he said, not necessary.
I insisted, and he relented. He gave me some parking instructions, helped me readjust the car in the space, then carried my bike back into lobby of my building.
I introduced him to the doormen.
See you around, he said as he left. Nice to meet you.
— Julie Blackburn
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
Davaughnia Wilson and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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The post She’s Making Her Met Debut. She’s a Snake. appeared first on New York Times.
