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Rose Made Man is an ópera comique, a style of French origin, meaning the dramatic work contains spoken dialogue. The opera is a coming of age story of a trans man named Gabriel, but also a coming of gender story since Gabriel was assigned female at birth, but identifies as a boy. Born deaf and thus having never heard his gender clearly spoken by others, he lives in a relative bubble until age ten when he gains his hearing and feels the full force of how his identity unsettles society. The opera follows Gabriel through four significant stages of his life – early childhood, grade school, high school, and early adulthood – corresponding to each of the scenes, where we see his attempt to reconcile both the societal expectations on gender versus his identity and the sound world of his deafness with the overwhelming new sound world after the cochlear implant.

Rose Made Man is an ópera comique, a style of French origin, meaning the dramatic work contains spoken dialogue. The opera is a coming of age story of a trans man named Gabriel, but also a coming of gender story since Gabriel was assigned female at birth, but identifies as a boy. Born deaf and thus having never heard his gender clearly spoken by others, he lives in a relative bubble until age ten when he gains his hearing and feels the full force of how his identity unsettles society. The opera follows Gabriel through four significant stages of his life – early childhood, grade school, high school, and early adulthood – corresponding to each of the scenes, where we see his attempt to reconcile both the societal expectations on gender versus his identity and the sound world of his deafness with the overwhelming new sound world after the cochlear implant.

This study examines a novel method to determine heavy metal contamination in the environment. This method will combine the established technique of atomic absorption spectroscopy with terrestrial isopods. The terrestrial isopods bioaccumulate heavy metals. The established forensic analysis by atomic absorption was used to quantify heavy metal poisoning. Spectroscopy determined the presence of arsenic and lead in four study areas. Arsenic contamination was the focus of this study. Lead contamination was done in parallel to verify the method. As part of the controls, three types of lumber were offered the isopods to feed on. Those lumber samples were kiln dried lumber, ACQ preserved lumber, and CCA preserved lumber. Three samples of terrestrial isopods were collected from each control and test area. The test areas included a private residence, the Rochester Institute of Technology campus, a local park, and a local gun club. In addition, standing water at the gun club was included as a separate sample; it tested 0 ppm for arsenic, and 1.257 ppm for lead. Although this method exhibited robustness and reliability, collection methods and weather conditions appeared to be the limiting factor. The impact of drought established that a minimum mass of sample is required.