Wasted on the young?

Salome was on the very full playbill the first summer I worked at the Santa Fe Opera, when it was still in the first theater--which resembled nothing so much as an incomplete barn--in '62 (though with Eleanor Lutton in the title role; the image above is from 1967, another staging of the Strauss biblical fable). Those were the first operas I had ever heard and seen performed.
What I remember most, musically, from that summer was the Stravinsky festival that was presented, with the maestro in attendance; it was his 80th birthday, and he and the SFO founder John Crosby were soulmates. (foto, right)
"We" did SIX Stravinsky operas in about three weeks, that summer: Mavra, Le Rossignol, Oedious Rex, Persephone, The rake's Progress and Renard.
This at the same time "we" were also producing repertoire classics like Tosca and Traviata, which the pros could perform in their sleep, but along with Honegger's "Joan of Arc..." and Strauss' aforesaid Salome, PLUS Cosi fan Tutte. It was a constant whirl, and music flooded everywhere, from rehearsal studios all over the "ranch." (foto, below:The first theater, which burned down in '67)
I worked on them all as an apprentice set-builder/laborer, and then as stage-hand moving sets and props at night during the shows. I was there for every rehearsals, and every performance. Always in the back. I knew it was an exceptional experience; I just didn't know HOW exceptional it was. I hadn't remembered this in years, but at the dress rehearsal of Tosca, when having killed Scarpia, she flung herself off the battlement to her death, there was an astonishing puff of dust from the p[adding behind the fall, which exploded in the lights, which was a novel effect, and was unanticipated.
I remember two, other, really outstanding moments, in particular, from my Summer of '62: 1) I appeared on-stage, once, in a Swiss-Guards uniform, filling out the ranks of the chorus in Tosca. And 2), at a cocktail party, I sat beside the Maestro, on the piano bench, turning pages of a score I could not read, while he played and members of the Opera cast took turns singing songs from Porgy and Bess; he nodded to me when the time was right to turn 'em. Didn't say a word.
Ultimately, I worked at the Opera for all or parts of three summers, 62-64, incl...
It was illuminating.