Displaced in New York

Dame Kiri Te Kanawa was amongst those present at the annual Christmas night dinner in the baronial Lincoln Center duplex of Sissy and Max Strauss in New York. Each holiday, more than a hundred opera singers and other displaced performers and their entourages who find themselves in New York marooned far from home gather to wine, dine and, naturally, entertain one another. “A lot of kids are here for Christmas and have nowhere to go,” said Te Kanawa, who, nursing a cold, perched on the stairs and begged off pleads to sing “Silent Night” in Maori. (The request was honoured instead by her countryman, Jim McLay, New Zealand’s representative to the United Nations, joined by his Hawaiian wife, Marcy.) Each Christmastime, Te Kanawa said, between shallow coughs, “I try to sponge off the Strausses.”