Sopranos, Anyone? - POW challenge

"Your ageratum are lovely, Signore Ratzenberger." Phillipe seized upon the first topic that came to his mind. It made him nervous to be at the Villa.

"Well, I aerated the soil, saturated them with plant food, planted ratsbane around the plot, and kept them hydrated. I killed a rattler. I think the danger is overrated but it still was quite an operation for an old baccarat player like myself." The wizened up old geezer was unsteady on his feet but his mind was clear as a bell.

"Now, Phillipe! Take notes or are you illiterate? Drat you ungrateful ratfink, you should regard me with veneration instead of merely tolerating me!" With that Ratzenberger stomped off hollering back, "Come along, Phillipe."

Phillipe stepped into the kitchen just as Ratzenberger served up two bowls of ratatouille. Motioning him to sit, Ratzenberger sat and began to eat his ration of stew. Bob felt like a rat in a trap. He joined him and began to speak.

"Signore, I've been checking the apparatus of the castrating device. It is a rattletrap. There are rattles everywhere. It's usefulness is overrated. It gyrates wildly. I had the operator look at it. He tried to calibrate it. It operated like a grater, lacerating two of his fingers. The machine is obdurate. The operator is, too, now. I think it should be incinerated, scratched from our warehouse, dropped into a crater, crated up and shipped out. It shouldn't be tolerated. You can plate it with 100 carats of gold but that would only decorate it. Take a ratchet to it. Appeal to the vizierate, see the curator of the museum, to the literati. Build a ziggurat over it, cover it in rattan, be democratic about it and vote, prorate it and sell it. At this rate, I don't believe we can produce any more castrato. " Phillipe took a breath. For just a second Phillipe thought he could hear a sigh coming from all the young men who would not be singing soprano.

Ratzenberger chuckled and orated, "Take a drink, Phillip. You'll get dehydrated! Have some wine. I allowed the skins to macerate for hours before I pressed them. That's why it is that lovely moderate pink."

While Bob sipped the wine, Ratzenberger made a steeple of his fingers and began to muse aloud. "I have been thinking of going into a new operation. Producing castrato for the choirs has been overrated lately. I believe we are going to change over to a winery."

Phillipe stopped drinking, to listen. "You know, Phillipe. I've always been an autocrat or a monocrat, not a democrat or a theocrat. Our operation will be huge, our wines will be rated A-One. Then I will build an opera house for my darling Karatina, the operatic star. Instead of making young boys into sopranos, we will bring the most beautiful soprano here to Villa Ratzenberger to sing her arias. What do you think."

Phillipe nodded, smiling. Once more that sigh drifted through the windows.