KEEPING FIT : Anti-Smoking Opera a Breath of Fresh Air : Opera Pacific takes its nicotine addiction messages to 160 elementary schools and 100,000 students.

Poor Harry--he’s having trouble falling asleep. So while his wife and children are sleeping, he plops down in an easy chair on the stage at Monte Vista Elementary School in Santa Ana to watch some television.

But first, he has to have a cigarette. He looks everywhere for one: behind the blinds, behind the chair, he even digs through the trash. Finally, he digs a solitary smoke out of the pocket of his bathrobe.

Before he can light up, however, Harry dozes off, only to be visited in a dream by some of the oddest characters since the ghosts dropped in on Ebenezer Scrooge.

There’s Fred and Ginger, the dancing nerve cells, and Sid and Celia, walking, talking ciliary cells--it’s their job to clean the lungs. A half-dozen children take on bit parts as air sacs, and suddenly Harry finds himself inside his own lungs.

Harry’s lungs, you see, are fed up with his smoking, and they’ve taken control long enough to get him to see the habit from their point of view.

He isn’t the only one who gets to see the damage smoking can do. The room is packed with children. Many of them, says Principal Don Tibbetts, are already familiar with smoking.

“I know some of you guys have tried it, because we’ve caught you,” he told the assembly before the performers took the stage. “We’ve had programs on drug abuse, alcohol abuse and gangs, but this is the first on smoking.”

“The Night Harry Stopped Smoking,” performed by the Overture Company of Opera Pacific, is presented by the American Lung Assn. of Orange County, and funded, ironically, by smokers themselves.

The tobacco tax passed by California voters in 1988 provides funds for health education and smoking prevention programs such as “Harry.” The lung association received a $100,000 grant from the state to provide free performances of the show at 160 elementary schools in the county, reaching approximately 100,000 students.

Before Harry ever walks onstage, the other performers enlist the children to sing an anti-smoking message, to the tune of “Frere Jacques” :

“Are you smoking?

Are you smoking?

Cigarettes?

Cigarettes?

Give up that tobacco,

It’ll make you wacko ,

Nasty old

Cigarettes. . . .”

And then, to make sure all the students at this inner-city school get the message, the performers repeat the message in Spanish.

The singing body cells pull no punches, calling Harry, among other things, “Butt Breath,” “Cancer Cancer” and “Smoker Choker.”

Harry remembers the first time he tried a cigarette, when he was 10. He thought it made him cool, more grown up. By the time he was in high school, he was hooked.

By now, the ciliary cells have long since given up trying to keep the lungs clean. “We know that your next cigarette will mess it up again,” one of them tells him.

With nearly an hour’s worth of message-filled songs (“Nico, nico, nicotine, that stuff is really nasty, really mean”) and barbed remarks (“Oh, Harry! You’re such an ashtray!”), the cells bombard Harry and the children with facts on the dangers of smoking.

Finally, after a touching plea from Pumper, his heart--performed to a rap beat (“It’s comin’ from your heart, but you got to use your brain”)--Harry decides to quit.

His decision is met with a combination of applause, shouts of “Bravo!” and Arsenio Hall-style woofing from the audience.

After they take their bows, the performers take a moment to involve the children in a discussion about the dangers of smoking as well as the art of opera.

The lung association also provides classroom materials for teachers who want to continue with the subject after the assembly, Cortez says.

“They can get children to write a letter to someone they care about and about what smoking does to the body,” she says.

“Harry” was written in 1981, and has been performed in numerous cities nationwide, Cortez says. The opera came to Orange County in 1988, but the lung association and Opera Pacific soon ran out of money for performances. “If the state hadn’t come up with the money, we wouldn’t have been able to continue.”

Tibbetts says he catches even very young children smoking. “When that happens, you hassle them a little and then let them go. I think something like this is much more effective.”