Things you wanna do before you die

When my (now) roommate "L" and I first met we were involved in an incident at a piano bar where I had worked at the time. It happened the week after 9/11, and only 1 mile from "ground zero." Tensions were high, of course and on this fateful night I was working behind the piano and "L" was there in the audience. Also in the audience was my crew of Monday night regulars, many of them ossified onto the bar stools upon which they had sat for many years. There was a temper flare, and one of the regulars (let's call him "Mike") badly insulted both me and my new friend. I lost my temper...I can truly say it was the only time in the past decade that I have ever lost my temper. I made a scene, or should I say exacerbated the existing scene. What came out of that night was a three year relationship with my new friend "L" and an animosity between me and "Mike" that lasted for years. I lost that job about a month or so later, and to this day I don't know if that scene had anything to do with it. But regardless, it was a good job to have, and an even better one to loose after having cut my teeth at the place for 2 years. Over the years, I have made peace with Mike, who before 9/11 had been my friend. Meanwhile "L" and I have gone from being lovers to ex-lovers to best friends and finally roommates (sans privileges, thank you very much!) Last night I brought "L" back to the scene of the crime, and there was Mike, sitting at the piano, 8 years later. "L" had really never forgiven "Mike" for this incident, but there we all were, and by the end of the night "L" and "Mike" were buying drinks for each other like they were old friends. There was hugs, tears and promises of everlasting friendship, etc, etc. A beautiful thing!

My own private jet

So i was at a piano bar in the village last night, hanging out with a friend. I was asked to sing a song, so I sang You Go To My Head, one of my very favorite jazz ballads. After I was done, this guy that was sitting at the piano drinking his vodka martini was so very impressed with me that he hands me a very cryptic business card which identifies him as the "Chairman" of a limited liability corporation with some acronym or other that I had never heard of. He tells me to call the number on the card on Monday morning and tell his assistant to put me in touch with him. The mere fact that I have his card will establish my bonafides with said assistant, he says. With a flourish he makes his grand exit from the piano, leaving the martini sitting there, half finished.......Ummmm....ok.

Five minutes later he returns. He immediately begins grousing about someone taking his martini away. (The barback must have cleared the piano of abandoned drinks). After we get through that he asks me what I'm doing next week. I tell him I have a flexible schedule. He asks if I could be in LA. I said, sure, if there was a reason to be there. "What if I were to send my private jet to pick you up?" He then goes on to tell me that his holding company (mysterious acronym on business card) of which he is chairman, owns a world-wide talent management company, XYZ..."surely you've heard of them?" Yes, of course. Well, I am so impressed with your singing that I want them to meet with you, blah, blah, blah.

Well, having worked in NYC for many years, I have to tell you that I've heard this all before, although never with the private jet coming to pick me up. I have to admit, that's a new twist. And of course, you gotta follow this through, on the extraordinarily slim chance that this guy might be for real. So, on Monday morning (11:30am, after my coffee, thank you very much) I will happily call his assistant and find out what time I need to be on the tarmac. What fun!!!

Oh, yeah...a foot note to the story: Some black guy with a voice wandered over to the piano after we had finished talking. My fancy chairman asks if he would sing "Sing Low, Sweet Chariot." Oy-fucking-vey!!

Two Girls, One Cup

Am I the last person to see this video???!!!

Ok...so i watched it. I didn't know what it was but I knew I was expected to react. Because of this expectation I didn't want to react. But it's just about an impossible task. I reacted. Then I watched some of the reaction videos on YouTube. Grandma and Kermit were my two favorites. I immediately began thinking of bits for dueling pianos. If you listen to the original Two Girls, One Cup video, there is a very distinct music track consisting of a piano and synthesized strings. If I were to play that music on stage, would people recognize it? Two Girls, One Cup is now part of our popular culture. If you watch the original video it certainly makes an indelible impression. I can't help but wonder if that impression would include the innocuous background music? When a traumatic event occurs, don't all your senses imprint? And if after watching the original video you then go on to watch all the reaction videos(which I did) you hear the original soundtrack in the backround several more times. Enough to imprint? Perhaps. And if people do recognize the music as I play it onstage, what will they do? How will they react? I think they will scream and stomp their feet and say...Oh my God!! Do you know what he's playing????!!!!

The Fall

I saw a film called The Fall yesterday. (And it is a film, for those of you that understand the lexicon) It will probably get forgotten in a couple of weeks by a movie public infatuated with superheros, comics and reiterations of Rambo and Indiana, two franchises that should have never been allowed to be sequeled after 20 years. I mean really! But back to The Fall. I was so enthralled by the trailer (see below), that I had to see it. I was not dissappointed. This film offers some of the finest photography and cinematography I've ever seen. Absolutely breathtaking. Catinca Untaru is the 10 year old actress that plays the main character, Alexandria. I don't recall having ever seen more authentic acting. Ever. See this perfomance before it leaves the big screen.

Avalon - the evil corporation

I live in a very new hi-rise building directly across the river from Manhattan. This is our pool. It is two lanes wide, although the second lane has been truncated to give space to the lovely concrete box that is one of the stairwells. The pool opened for the very first time today, memorial day. The idea of a pool is nice, of course, but this pool and surrounding deck is way too small for the 600 apartments it serves. This picture was taken at 11:30am. The shady part of the deck has marched inexorably Northwards squeezing the occupants into a smaller and smaller space for sunbathing. Whoever designed the building clearly didn't account for the shadow a 39 floor building would cast upon a pool deck located on the 9th floor. Another thing that really irritates me is that they only purchased 8 (count them, eight...for 600+ apartments!) deck chairs. When the chairs arrived, they were artistically situated diagonally and spaced apart in such a way that they used up much of the space of the West side of the deck--in the same way that lazy students use a word processor to make 2 pages of information look like 5 pages. No doubt the entire setup was built only so that the building could boast a pool. There was no real consideration for the actual usage of the pool. It's way too small, overcast most of the day, and to ad insult to injury, the rich corporation (Avalon) that I write my rent check to skimped on the number of deck chairs. But with the Manhattan views the pool deck offers, it will sure make a great picture in the promo brochure.

Taxes

I just read an entry on a friend's blog that he received his tax refund. To be honest, I have not filed my tax return for the past 2 years. It's not that I don't owe taxes (I do) or that I morally object to how this government chooses to spend my tax money (and I do, oh how I do!), or that given the chance I would cheat the government out of their fair share (doesn't everybody?)...no, it's much more elemental than that. I have such a strong aversion to sitting down with those papers and making sense and order out of them. And what makes this just plain stupid is that I have an accountant who is going to fill out the forms for me. All I have to do is send him the appropriate papers and fill out a questionaire. And yet here I am, spending time writing about how I hate doing it, rather than just simply doing it! All other areas of my life are in order...why is this such a problem.

Sunday morning at the Turkish Baths

After a night of moderate drinking, I woke this morning to my roommate shaking me and telling me it was time to go to the Bathhouse. After a hastily downed cup of French Roast (Gourmet Garage), we took two trains and one bus and a 10 minute walk to land us in the lower east side of Manhattan where we entered the Turkish and Russian Baths. Apparently Sundays are "all-male" day, which I guess means that it is coed the rest of the week. There was a Hassaidic Jew replete with curls, etc. in front of us. As we came up to the counter we placed all valuables in a little safe deposit box, was given a locker key and pointed to the locker room. After undressing and wrapping impossibly small towels around our waists, we went down a narrow flight of stairs where there were 4 saunas, 2 steam rooms each of varying temperatures, and one ice cold dipping pool. We began in one of the steam rooms, and after 10 minutes went into the least hot sauna, slowly working our way up to the absurdly ridiculously hot sauna, and finally jumping into the ice cold water. It was quite a process, and my head was certainly cleared after all the snot ran uncontrollably out of my nose. After the two final temperature extremes, upon exiting the cold water, my body felt as if it had just been rubbed down with menthol. The other clientele were a mixture of gay men, and presumably straight Russians and Turks. Best of all...not one tourist. There was some discrete cruising but nothing tawdry or obscene. Once of the things I liked was that I never felt as though I had to pose. With sweat pouring out of every possible gland, and snot running down your nose, along with everybody else, you can just relax and not worry about looking pretty. In a city where appearance is everything, this is a neutral ground indeed. I probably won't go back, though. It was too cramped, damp and poorly lit for a truly relaxing experience. And I'm not sure all of the torture I put myself through in those temperature extremes was worth the effort. My head was clear, however, when I left, and since we were in a Polish neighborhood, we found a cute Polish diner where we had our first meal at 2pm. Perogies and omelettes on the patio.

Rockin' out down South

I just returned from the South where I did my first real dueling gig. I worked 4 nights and one afternoon with several different piano players and drummers. Armed with my 55 memorized songs I am proud to say I kicked some butt. Each night was different, with Saturday night being the absolute craziest. The club was filled to capacity. There were 3 of us that rotated on 2 pianos, so it was 1 hour onstage, and 1/2 hour offstage, then back up again. The drummer was situated downstage behind the two baby grands. The audience on Saturday night was packed with a lot of military guys that had just arrived stateside from Afganistan and Iraq, many of them finished their final tour and were getting out of the military within the week. We were rocking, we were getting filthy and we were having a ton of fun, and the room loved every second of it. So this is the payoff for all the work and the practicing and the memorizing...and it's damn worth it! So now, the work continues...learning and memorizing more and more songs and comedy bits. But, what a payoff. This could possibly be about the funnest job in the world. The next post I'll tell you about the redneck drama.

The Holy Bible

It reads as follows:

Warning: This is a work of fiction. Do NOT take it literally.

Content Advisory: Contains verses descriptive or advocating suicide, incest, bestiality, sadomasochism, sexual activity in violent context, murder, morbid violence. use of drugs or alcohol, voyeurism, revenge, undermining of authority figures, lawlessness and human right violations and atrocities.

Exposure Warning: Exposure to contest for extended periods of time or during formative years in children may cause delusions, hallucinations, decreased cognitive and objective reasoning abilities and, in extreme cases, pathological disorders, hatred, bigotry and violence, including, but not limited to fanaticism, murder, and genocide.

The Judy Garland Show

It happened. Another Judy Garland tribute show held at the Duplex. I was surprisingly pleased with how it went. My singer got through her show and the audience (mostly her friends) really enjoyed it. She started out nervous and was rushing through things, and I was able to make her take things a bit less seriously through some unscripted onstage interaction. I was complimented after the show by many of the people who attended, specifically upon the energy and repoire between myself and the singer. That made me happy. I really felt as though I did a nice job supporting her, and that of course is the totality of my job once the lights come up. There was one very important NYC cabaret personage in the audience that saw me perform, I believe for the first time. It was all good. The singer (Judy) asked if I would continue to be her music director for future shows, and I'm excited to to do so as I have many things to teach her...things that have been passed on to me from those wiser and more experienced.

Memorize, memorize and more memorize

I have 47 songs completely memorized. That's 47 songs in about 4 weeks. Now granted, about 15 of these songs I've been playing for years, but even so, they were never memorized. So for a guy who always believed I have the worst memory of any pianist in NYC, I'm really excited about my progress. I have had some help. A friend of mine learned Russian while in the Army about 20 years ago. His job was to intercept their military communications. Very hush, hush, top secret and all that cold war nonsense. But he had to learn Russian very rapidly and I asked him how he had done it. He steered me towards a book by Harry Lorayne which tries to give you skills in association. For instance: suppose you are learning French vocabulary and you are trying to memorize the word for Duck, which is canard (ka-nar). If you visualize, i mean really visualize "someone throwing a can hard, and you duck," you can create an association between the English and the french word. This book teaches that the more ridiculous the picture you create for your association, the easier it is to remember. Suppose you are trying to remember a list of seemingly unrelated items in order. You would associate each item with the previous item in some very ridiculous way. For instance, if you are associating the word airplane with tree, you might come up with a picture of a million trees flying through the air; or big jetliner landing in a small tree. Even though I'm not even half-way through this book, it has me thinking in ways I've never thought before, and I'm sure it's helping with my memorization of songs. The latest two songs on my piano are Hey There Delilah and Hurts So Good. I have 10 more days before I go down South to perform all of this music.

Oh, Dios mio!

Last night my doorbell rings. Before I have time to walk the 20 feet from the piano to the door, it is ringing incessantly. Now I have a doorman that is supposed to screen all visitors and call up for permission to send up the visitor, but clearly this didn't happen, and I don't like people knocking on my door unexpectedly. It's a NYC privacy thing. This is why we have doormen. I open the door and there is this beautiful Puerto Rican girl of about 25 or so with her 10 year old son. It seems that she is from the Census Bureau and would like to ask me some questions. "Sure!" I say, knowing how important this is. She immediately begins firing questions at me, still standing in the hallway. I suggest that we move the party inside. After about 40 minutes of very personal questions, some of which I denied to answer, thank you very much, and 12 pages later, she finished. She didn't like the fact that I declined to answer some of the questions and spent a significant amount of time trying convincing me that this information was confidential and my government would NEVER use it in any way other than that which it was intended. Yeah, that didn't fly. I began telling her all about illegal wiretapping, arrogant presidents and the demise of the Constitution, an exercise in silliness considering that she really wasn't that bright. I did question her about the timing of the census as I thought it wasn't supposed to happen until 2010. But apparently the Department of Commerce and the City of NY sponsor this census and they do it every 3 years, and only 1 in 270 households gets to participate. Who knew?

After she finished she turned the form back to the front page where I happened to notice that this particular form that we had just filled out was intended not for my apartment at all, but rather the one across the way. I pointed that out to her and she responded by saying, "Oh, Dios mio," or some such expletive and her pencil eraser began flying a mile a minute over every personal answer that I had just spent 40 some damn minutes giving her, right there on my kitchen counter (the very same place that my roommate would to park his stoned ass a short 26 hours later and pretend he was Michelangelo Lloyd Webber, but that's another post). So there we all were, her, her kid, myself, and eraser dust flying everywhere, getting all cozy and laughing about the whole thing. I found out that "dad" was also a musician, and that today mom had bought the boy a cute little puppy for $800 and that it was making mommie sneeze and she was considering taking it to the pound. When the entire thing was all through, I think I learned more about her, her kid and her "kid's father" than she had erased about me and my "household." She left around 10:15 pm, and I could hear her banging on the door across the way 30 seconds later.

Cut to the following day.

I entered my building at 5 in the afternoon with "Tenacious D" blasting "F*#k Her Gently" in my ipod head phones when a small child comes running up from behind me and grabs my hand and begins pulling it hard, trying to get my attention. I turn around and see it's the 10 year old boy that was in my apartment last night. He is very excited to see me. I guess I hadn't really realized the extent of our bonding. He wants to show me his little puppy that is apparently helping out with the census today, as his mother was talking to the doorman, (puppy in hand) no doubt to torture another hapless resident. Oh, Dios mio!

work...continued

Ok...it seemed to work. Judy and I got a lot of good work done tonight at our rehearsal, and she realized that the charts she gave me from her last music director were very umm....unclear. She accepted my suggestion and we worked out only 4 songs, but we spent an appropriate amount of time on them and they came out really well, and both of us began to feel much better about working together. I came home to my stoned roommate trying to make a clay "Phantom" mask all over the kitchen counter with Bernadette Peters' Sondheim, etc. Concert blasting. Oy!

Work

Well I got a phone call last weekend. A very nervous cabaret singer with a music director that had gone MIA. She's got this Judy Garland tribute show she's doing (does this town really need yet another Judy Garland cabaret show?...really really??) and so I'm stepping into someone else's shoes and have to make this work. She is very nervous and it is affecting our rehearsals because she is coming from a place of fear. She wants to rush through a run-through all the songs she is doing rather than spending quality time on each and then putting it all together in a later rehearsal. And in her rapid run-through, because she has not articulated, and in many cases not even thought of what exactly she wants, we are not in sync, and she's freaking out. I think tonight I will take control of this rehearsal and see if I can get her to do it my way. I'll let you know how it all works out.

one week later

Comments anyone?

Job offer

Well, it is beginning. I got my first real job offer as a Dueler yesterday. The owner of the club I was training at all last week made a phone call and as a result I was invited to play a four night gig at another club down South. It will still be training, but the pay is fair, the travel expenses will be picked up and I will be playing the entire gig, not just sitting around watching. The guy I will be training with has an amazing reputation as an entertainer and as a musician, so I expect to learn a lot. I can already tell from talking to him several times that he has a very strong personality. This will be a real good opportunity to practice humility. Oy!! Oh, and I have been instructed NOT to bring any music up on stage with me. Which means, I have reduced my available repertoire down to about 25 songs. I expect that by the time I do this gig, in 3 weeks from now, I will have memorized another 15. This should be reeeal interesting. At least the guy training me is fully aware of where I'm at.

Busy Week

Well I'm finally back in NYC after spending over a week at my "audition" down South. The original audition was only for the first weekend, but they asked me to stay a second weekend to continue the process. The answer to the question everyone seems to ask is, No, I didn't get exactly what I wanted. They didn't offer me a real job. I was told I still need more time for preparation and training. Well, that's why I went down there in the first place. I was applying for a "training" position as a dueling pianist. I think my presence there helped the club owner and the other two pianists define what they were really looking for, which was not a trainee at all, but rather an "A" player to replace the guy that left. This is all fine. I was treated very well by the club, the owner, and the other pianists. They paid me a nominal fee for my training and housed me. I was responsible for all travel.

Meanwhile, after having been immersed in the world of Dueling Pianos for the past 9 days, I am as motivated as ever to continue my practicing. I currently have 230 rock songs that I know, so I will now change my focus from adding new songs to memorizing and mastering the ones I know. Everyone I speak with tells me I should work to get "off book". OK. Message received, loud and clear. Even though I have always believed I have a really shitty memory, I'm motivated, so I will do this. I already have about 20 songs under my belt.

It was very cool being up on stage in a real venue with several hundred people paying attention. And I have always been very nervous about being on a stage like that, but this week i discovered that it wasn't all that scary, and even though I was unsure of how well I would do each time I got on stage (that due to all the critisism I was getting all week) I found that I wasn't nervous. I managed an attitude that I would either do well or I wouldn't but either way I would learn. And that is unusual for me. I have always been terrified of doing badly on stage. And when I was up there, I found myself much more focused than ever been, even though everything was unfamiliar and I was juggling so many things at once.

One cool number the other pianists did was Sweet Child of Mine. One of the pianists got in costume as Axel Rose, jumped up on top of the two grand pianos and played electric guitar. They had special lighting, and we were working with a drummer. It sounded amazing. Meanwhile, the bar manager poured Bacardi 151 on top of the pianos, at the guitarist's feet and lit them so there were flames shooting up. He then used the rest of the 151 to blow fire out of his mouth in front of the pianos...it was quite spectacular.

DuelingPiano Audition

I was invited down to the Carolinas to audition at a dueling piano bar. I sat in on Saturday with 3 other players and an adoring audience of 300 rock-lovin' southerners, singing Sweet Home Alabama and Santeria. Apparently the bar can and does hold 425 but it was a "light" night because of the NCAA final four games that night. So the good news is that I was invited to stay on through this weekend to continue the audition process. I expect to be back in NYC on Sunday. Now back to memorizing more lyrics!

for thought

Why in this country are we violent and literate?
Answer: Because we are taught to read.