THE CONDOR QUEENS OF CUZCO

Suck it, Orville. Long before some Ohio bicycle bros got a glorified kite airborne for twelve seconds, a guild of absolute mad-women in the Andes were staging the world’s first—and, arguably, best—aerial opera. We’re talking sometime around 900 AD, give or take a century I can’t be bothered to look up. Forget pottery and textiles; the real artistic innovation of the pre-Inca world was the *Warmi Phawan*, the “Flying Women,” a sorority of sopranos with more balls than a llama ranch and the lung capacity to prove it.

Their technology was equal parts genius and batshit insanity. They’d strap themselves into harnesses woven from the finest vicuña wool (a material so soft it was basically a continuous, full-body orgasm) attached to enormous wings. These weren’t your flimsy Da Vinci sketches. We’re talking massive frames of balsa wood covered in the plucked feathers of every giant condor they could get their hands on—making them both the world’s first aviators and the world’s most fabulous ecological disaster. The lead diva, a terrifyingly ambitious woman named Cusi, was said to have a wingspan of thirty feet and a voice that could shatter limestone from a thousand yards. Her pre-flight ritual? A gourd of fermented maize beer and screaming at a rock until it developed anxiety.

And the OPERA! Holy shit. The plots made Wagner look like a minimalist. One surviving (and probably fake) libretto, “The Horny Mountain and the Chaste Llama,” tells the epic tale of an amorous volcano god, Apu Pube-sali, who threatens to erupt all over a defenseless valley unless the sky-maiden sings him to a gentle, non-lava-based climax. The famous Nazca lines? Those weren’t for aliens, you simpletons. They were stage directions. The geoglyph of the monkey is where the chorus would perform their big number about sexually transmitted debt. As one alleged eyewitness, a ground-crew member named Paqo, is quoted on a recently-discovered potsherd: “The pay was terrible and the costumes were a bitch to clean, but when Cusi hit her high note right as the sun set over the Andes… well, it was almost worth getting shat on from 200 feet up.”

The whole glorious enterprise came crashing down, as these things do, because of carbs. With fame came feasts, and with feasts came a collective and catastrophic failure of the lift-to-drag ratio. The final performance of “The Potato’s Revenge” was a notorious disaster. Cusi, fresh off a celebratory binge of twenty-seven different kinds of tubers, apparently achieved a flight trajectory best described as “a brick with ambition.” Her slow, operatic descent into a cushy bog marked the end of the aerial opera. The Spaniards, arriving centuries later, found only fossilized feathers and a lingering sense of theatrical despair. They declared it the devil’s work, because of course they did—no one ever suspects the humble potato.