Opera in Texas

La Traviata: "The tale of a cutie with a cough and no four-way pills."

Lucia di Lammermoor: "Her brother done her dirt, and she went nuts on E flat above high C."

Samson and Delilah: "Moral: never let a dancing girl get in your hair."

With such thumbnail plot summaries, a 56-year-old disc jockey named Reuben Bradford is selling opera to Texans. On Dallas' station WFAA, his Opera Once Over Lightly is beamed directly at "the taxi-driver who likes Figaro, but doesn't know why."

Son of a railway worker and great-grandson of a Methodist bishop, Bradford picked up his Runyonesque jargon as a carnival piano player, horse trainer, apprentice embalmer, boxer ("I was stomped on up and down the border for five pesos and a bowl of chili per fight"). He once carried a spear in Aida when Caruso sang Radames.

As a man who learned fugues before fractions, Bradford is content to spin recordings of 24 operas for a salary of $25 a week. He is never disrespectful to the music of opera, only its plots: "What is opera but some of the world's finest sounds wrapped up in the world's silliest stories?"

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