Insiders say it was their best performance yet, but the judges in Brockton failed to send Duxbury High School’s thespians on to the finals for the 2012 Massachusetts Educational Theater Guild’s Festival of Plays. Duxbury High School Drama and Thespian Troupe #355 presented Deborah Brevoort’s “Women of Lockerbie,” which I reviewed last week. Like figure skating, a judged competition in theater always runs the risk of unexpected disappointment and personal tastes in the judging process – but I was in New York, so I can’t speak to the relative merits of the performances in Brockton. I can, however, say that Duxbury’s dramatists gave us an unforgettable piece of theater in “Women of Lockerbie.” My own bit of theater this past week-end took me to New York, where my wife and I saw Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” at the Metropolitan Opera. We drove this time, ably guided by the cool, confident tones of Nora ffolkes, as we have dubbed the voice of my new GPS gizmo. Mrs. ffolkes has utterly captivated me, and her knowledge is beyond calculation – she actually slipped us onto to an access road alongside the Cross Bronx Expressway, saving us valuable time. I think of her as my on-board computer, Star Trek style, or I fantasize that she is real, flesh and blood, working tirelessly from her cubicle in London, under-paid and hopelessly dedicated as she collates satellite images of my car with her boundless supply of GIS mapping data.

I risk name-dropping ‘The Met” only because the road trip is surprisingly simple, especially on matinee Saturdays. Round-trip bus fare from South Station runs $36 or less on several different carriers. There are essentially no bad seats at the Met, where the acoustics are so good that you will hear the rustle of the leading lady’s skirts as clearly as the voices of world-class singers, even from the reasonably priced nosebleed seats (the Family Circle).

Season tickets are something of a commitment – next year’s are on sale now – but in a month or two you’ll be able to buy smaller packages. We started with a three-pack years ago, and never looked back.

Wagner’s Ring Cycle has been a particular highlight, but nothing has surpassed for me a single scene in Puccini’s “La Boheme,” in Act II, a wintery street scene in Paris that convinces me that, were I able to do so without being tackled by an usher, I could slip onto the stage, turn a corner, and disappear forever into the snow-packed city – Paris, not New York. Not even Nora ffolkes could find me there.

Wagner’s music is famously huge – six harps in the orchestra, for example – but when you hear it performed live it becomes surprisingly life-sized. You hear musical figures that reach you from different angles in a personal way that is lost in the amalgam of any recorded sound. The result is a sense of place and space that, like the scene from La Boheme, convinces you that you could step into another world, another place, and stay there forever.

As I write, I am listening to Mozart’s “La Nozze di Figaro,” the opera he comically quoted in the final scene of the darker masterpiece, Don Giovani. It reminds me that Mozart (as portrayed in the film Amadeus) asserted that only in music can multiple lines of thought or expression unfold simultaneously and remain comprehensible. For all of the stagecraft of La Boheme at the Met, or the Ring Cycle, or the stunning simplicity and depth of “Women of Lockerbie” at the PAC, it is music that completes the weaving of dimensions into an otherwise incomprehensible whole. In the painful, uplifting climax of “Lockerbie,” the women carry the tattered clothes of strangers killed in the sky or smashed into the earth of their little town, carry them down to the river, a river made as real as Wagner’s Rhine, and wash them to be returned to other strangers, the grieving families of the victims. As they wash, they begin to sing, like a Greek chorus, but more like the ageless women of Scotland who sing their waulking songs as they work. They sang, our Duxbury children, and our tears flowed like a healing river.