Time Off: Precious Moments

Francis Petrash, a Scient Inc. partner, was raised in a family of steelworkers and miners in Pennsylvania, where Willie Nelson got more airplay than Verdi. But, as he entered his teen years, he won some scholarships and was sent away to private school in Washington, DC. According to Petrash, his two worlds have converged in his latest hobby: writing a country and western opera.
Petrash, 50, and his wife, Shelby Head, who lived in the Southwest for 16 years, brainstormed on how to combine the two music styles. The five-act opera is about a lone cowboy who is working in an Albuquerque silicon wafer plant and falls in love with a local Mexicano girl.
"It has to be a tragedy because it's an opera, right?" asks Petrash, who lives in Madison, CT. In the story, the girl's Mexicano family is at odds with the cowboy's Anglo family —