Noted New York Times editor Mervyn Rothstein once attended a performance of Turandot at New York City's Metropolitan Opera. Rothstein was among the guests invited for a dessert-and-coffee buffet in Met GM Joseph Volpe's office during the intermission:
"He puts [us] at ease with just the right anecdote, often a self-effacing one," Rothstein recalled. "Pointing to a caricature of himself in opera costume framed on the wall, he laughs. 'They did that for a profile of me in Connoisseur magazine,' he says. 'It was the last issue. They put me in the magazine, and it folded.'"
[An unlikely impressario, Volpe, before joining the Met as an apprentice stagehand in 1964, opened and ran his own auto repair shop and helped to manufacture baseball pitching machines.]
Sources
Cigar Aficionado, 1996
