It was perhaps not a typical Sunday afternoon in a Glasgow park.

The woman dressed as a Japanese geisha lost her paper parasol to a gust of wind. A gangling youth in a grey track-suit striding past gallantly retrieved it. She couldn't properly thank him as she had begun singing by this point. In Italian.

There were at least eight dogs patiently watching her. The cairn terrier asleep on his owner's lap next to me, did sit up expectantly when the geisha hit some very high notes as if he'd heard a distant whistle proclaiming food was on its way. But none of the dogs made a sound. "Curious," Sherlock Holmes would have observed if he'd been there.

The children were not as well behaved as the dogs. Two wee boys were kicking a football, unconcerned that the lady in the foreign garb appeared to have been stood up. "Vedi? È venuto!" she sang, but everyone else there knew she was kidding herself. The love of her life wasn't coming.

She then pulled out a knife, which is probably a dangerous thing to do in a Glasgow park these days, considering the recent news about the high number of police officers wandering Scotland while armed to the teeth.

The erudite among you, which is of course all Herald readers, will have worked out that a knife-wielding geisha singing in Italian could only mean Cio-Cio San, the poor besotted woman in Puccini's Madama Butterfly whose unrequited love for an American sailor - there are a few mature women in the Dunoon area who can sympathise with that - leads eventually to her death. Apologies if that spoiled the ending for you, but it's opera. Pretty much everyone dies at the end in opera.

So Scottish Opera, which is putting on the full Madama Butterfly just now, has cleverly conceived a very slimmed down potted version of the show with the young graceful soprano Ruth Kerr as Butterfly, accompanied by a cellist and a harpist with a witty narrator who takes the audience through the show in just half-an-hour. It is touring Scotland just now for free in order to introduce opera to those who might find the whole opera-going idea a tad off-putting.

On Sunday it was at the recently refurbished bandstand in Queen's Park which is now called the Queen's Park Arena. Bandstands presumably sound a bit old-fashioned. It was cleaned up, not by the council, but a group of local volunteers, and the lunchtime concert attracted over 200 people, some of whom wisely carried cushions to cushion their backsides. I'm no expert on bandstands, but I think the broad shallow steps were designed for people to park their deck-chairs on. To sit without deck-chair on the hard concrete with little room down to the next step, leaves you stumbling drunkenly around afterwards as the circulation slowly seeps back when you uncurl your stiffened limbs.

Ruth was delightful as the vulnerable and self-deluded Butterfly, her voice tremulous when expecting the return of the cad Pinkerton, yet soaring when she showed her determination to save her son, if not herself. "A woman who loved too deeply with a man whose passions were so shallow," recounted the narrator. The crowd was hushed by the performance, apart from when a very young girl shouted out: "Why is she singing again?" The little girl's mother gave the universal reply of all mothers: "Shoosh."

When Butterfly brandished the blade towards the end of the show a little boy at the front returned to his mother afterwards and told her authoritatively: "It was a toy knife." So much knowledge of weaponry in one so young.

It's a shame that anyone would think of opera as being elitist. I was introduced to it by the STUC when I was but a mere industrial reporter, and the trade union movement had taken over a performance of Leonard Bernstein's Candide at Glasgow's Theatre Royal to encourage the workers to attend opera. The brilliant theatre director Jonathan Miller came to a press conference to explain the admittedly complicated Candide to the assembled industrial reporters who, used to simply asking: "Are you going on strike?" and "How much money are you after?" to various union leaders, were struggling to follow the twisting explanations of Miller. So I went to the show to see what Miller was talking about. Leonard Bernstein himself was there, a camel-haired coat casually thrown over his shoulders - he's the only person I've met who can carry off that look - and a fag constantly in his hand.

The desperate show-offs gathered round him in the foyer, moths around a single light-bulb, calling him Lenny as if the New York-based composer called into Cowcaddens every other weekend. The show itself was magical. I mean, you have an orchestra of over 40 musicians, a chorus of over 40 singers, and another 10 or so principal singers. Over 100 people performing for you. I've been at football matches where the crowd was smaller than that.

No wonder Scottish Opera costs the Government a lot of money. But when the first chords of the overture strike up and you lose yourself in the music, the singing and the story, it really is worth every penny. Take Butterfly's advice. Have a stab at it if you've never been before.