In case you missed it, the NY Times had a fun piece late last week about a city busdriver given to belting out opera at red lights. Christopher G. Dolan has been briving a dus, as Ralph Kramden so eloquently put it, for 27 years. These days he steers the M8 from West Village to East.
“This is difficult sitting down,” said the driver, Christopher G. Dolan, 51. “You got to be standing up.”
He had miles to go before he could do that – about 2.2 miles, to the end of the line on East 10th Street. There, in the shadow of a housing project by the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive, he spent a four-minute layover in the aisle, practicing Alfredo’s half of “Libiamo ne’ lieti calici”-the drinking song from “La Traviata,” a duet.
Dolan is a natural baritone who retrained himself to be a tenor.
Two bucks for a ride across town and a free show sure beats a $150 ticket to Turandot at Lincoln Center.