A nightmare trio of underemployed opera singers perform the stirring aria “Non devi andare a casa ma non puoi restare qui” — “You don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here” — outside a 7-11 near the trolley downtown.

Recently, a number of 7-11 owners around the country have admitted that they play opera inside their stores in a surprisingly successful effort to drive away the homeless. Still more recently, a number of 7-11 owners around San Diego’s downtown have admitted to hiring opera singers to take their sound to the streets surrounding the stores, to equally positive effect. “It’s strange,” says Dev Tosca, who manages a branch of the convenience chain at 16th and C Street, “because operas are full of characters suffering from madness, or abandonment, or illness, or poverty, or betrayal, just like many of the homeless. And yet there seems to be a lack of identification, of connection — to the point where they will actively flee a performance from La Boheme, which is all about poverty and illness among society’s outcasts! So no, I don’t understand it. But I do know that it works, and that there are plenty of hungry singers out there who are eager to be useful for a change. It seems rich people don’t like opera that much any more, either.”