Dispatch from a Banquette

Lou Reed was sitting at the table next to mine last night, in a tiny basement cabaret in the theater district. I have no talent for recognizing celebrities, but the few I have have invariably been musicians.
On the banquette right next to me was a man there alone, in beautiful clothes, and we struck up a conversation. (“I’m a jazz vocalist.” “I’m a poet.”) “Because the way people receive music has changed, people hardly ever see live performance,” he rued. “And the training we used to get, which was to come to clubs like this and try things out, see what worked and what didn’t, and get mentored by older guys, that’s gone.” Eventually the lights went down and my friends Bree and Franklin began the show (if you’re in NYC—go see it!).

In contrast to the open mike in the next room, where Midler karaoke was in full swing, Bree performed “songs and recitations from the Victorian Era through the nineteen-thirties” (Franklin accompanied on piano). It wasn’t camp. I suppose a critic would call it straight-up antiquarianism, but it was deeply imagined and revelatory and yes, enchanting. Perhaps there was some connection between their show and the new Helen Adam Reader in my bag. Her sinister ballads don’t have too much in common with Bree’s alternately weepy and comedic vaudeville, but both excavate a lost populist art to connect to an inner world of latent powers (emotions). That is, neither seems to be trying to “make it new”—intimating that such a self-conscious notion contains too much ego, whereas the effacement of ego is the profoundest path to art.
Earlier that day, by chance, I had taken my four-year-old son to his first live show—a theater production of The Velveteen Rabbit (1946). He kept whispering to me, “This is the best movie I ever saw!” drinking in the light direction (now green, now purple), the recorded narration (“Who’s talking, Mom? Where is she?”), the extraordinary puppets and props (a giant pop-up book that, with each page turned, displayed a different mise-en-scene from boys’ adventure stories…). We were both exhilarated as we left the theater, walking out into the drizzling snow of early twilight with the sense that there is indeed a fairy who can make things real with enough love.
What should this post be “about,” I wonder—suddenly adrift in possibility. Should I say something about the character of live performances (note to self: check to see if “character” and “charisma” are etymologically related) which my banquette-neighbor was mourning? Am I revisiting the notion of enchantment again, as I am wont to do from time to time? Am I subconsciously processing Alicia’s last two posts—about formalism and tradition, and her two rare nights out (we mothers of young children, in addition to facing discrimination, are hard pressed to get out and be active participants in culture)?
A diary of coincidences might be enough. There was a weird moment when I thought Helen Adam really did influence the evening. On the train ride into the city I had been reading her correspondence with Robert Duncan. Then when we arrived at Grand Central and saw with dismay that the Oyster Bar was closed (I was going to treat my husband to dinner; Xmas present), we felt lost. The clock was ticking. I quickly suggested we repair to the newsstand to see if a TimeOut or Village Voice could recommend something in the theater district. And the listings we checked held little appeal, except that a restaurant called St. Andrews was closest to our theater. Scottish food? We looked at each other with some trepidation but agreed that it seemed our best option. And so it was: the cozy saloon delivered delicious food, not necessarily Scottish. But as I slid into a booth and gazed around me at the photos of firths and castles, the plopping of my bag (heavy with the big tome) gave me a bit of a start, and I realized that Adam herself would have never owned up to a “mere” coincidence.