You Can Only Live So Long

Richard Versalle was portraying the minor role of a law clerk named Vitek in a performance at the prestigious Metropolitan Opera in New York City. He was age 63 and had suffered absolutely no adverse health problems. In the opera there is a beautiful and mysterious woman who wants to live forever. Her father, a chemist-magician, concocts a powerful elixir which allows her to live more than 300 years. But Versalle, portraying the law clerk, sings a line which goes, “You can only live so long.” Little did anyone who attended the opera that night realize that those words—“You can only live so long”--would be the last sentence ever to come from the lips of this man whose singing had touched the hearts of thousand and thousands in his career.