Singing in the Rain
We are in NYC for the weekend to see the kids. We specifically came this weekend because our youngest granddaughter, Evelyn, is performing in a choral group today out at The Theater at City Tech in downtown Brooklyn. She will be amongst about 100 of here fellow choral boys and girls and she is thrilled to be in the front row so that we can all see and hear her clearly. She told us that she is one half excited and one half nervous, imagine that. It’s fun to watch the kids discover things that we all know, but that can’t be taught half as easily as they can be learned through experience. Evelyn carefully explained that she will be wearing a crisp white shirt and a black skirt with \black tights and black shoes as her “uniform” for the performance. It actually seems more like a uniform than a costume given the black and white theme.
We caught an Uber from the Cornell Club after lunch at the nearby Pan Quotidian, where the soup is hot and the tables communal. We have to take our umbrellas because while yesterday was a bright and cool sunny day, today is a cool and rainy day on the streets of New York. The theater in downtown Brooklyn is actually pretty nice and very professional looking. We arrived just in time for the doors to open to ticket holders, so we were able to go straight in and to our seats in the second row orchestra. We were what Kim calls House Left and the piano and twin bongo drums were front and center in our field of vision. After canoodling about where Evelyn was likely to be standing (she was assigned to be in the front row), we determined that her mother, her grandmother and KiKi (Kim) needed to be as close to centerstage as possible so that the bongo drums wouldn’t interfere with their line of sight to Evelyn (for the obvious photo closeups). That arrangement left me all the way house left right behind the bongo drums.
When Evelyn’s group came on stage, sure enough, she was in the front row stage right or house left, pretty much where we expected her to be, and what I saw throughout her 15 minute performance was a pair of bongo drums with a head on it that looked a lot like Evelyn. Nevertheless, it was a sweet concert and she sang four songs with lots of expressive gestures. And like all kids concerts, it was a pleasure just to see her on stage, animated and learning how to perform for an audience. I will say that the choral group that she sang with, as per what I read in the program, is considered one of the best children’s choral groups in the country, led by a woman who is acclaimed for her teaching and organization of children’s choral groups.
At the end of the performance, we all gathered in obligatory fashion in the lobby, and waited to receive our star as her mother retrieved her from the dismissal room. We showered her with all the usual accolades and hugs, and gave her a bouquet of flowers to make her feel as special as she was this day. These childhood events are familiar to us all as parents and grandparents and this same familial act was being played out by 100 other family groups in that same lobby. Some things never change and it’s nice that they don’t.
It had not stopped raining out, and our restaurant was shown on Apple Maps as being an 18 minute walk from where we were. We were certain that getting a cab or an even an Uber would be a monumental task on a midday rainy Saturday in Brooklyn, so we began to hoof it towards the river, heading for our lunch/dinner spot. We all had our umbrellas, which are things that you generally only use in the city, but which come in very handy on a day like today. Not surprisingly, it took pretty much 18 minutes to walk to the restaurant. We weaved our way from downtown Brooklyn to the waterfront, shucking and jiving through the street lights and past, through and under the entry ramps to the Brooklyn Bridge, passing one after another famous photo opportunity spot from down under the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges (Dumbo).
The restaurant was in one of these renovated and hip loft buildings that used to house the industrial and commercial businesses of New York City, and was probably a import/export (Vandalay Enterprises?) or warehousing operation at some point. That meant it was all stone and ancient wooden beams, renovated beautifully into a mini urban mall that had a nice big Italian restaurant with windows that looked right out onto the river and lower Manhattan, where Kim and I used to live not so very long ago.
There were nine of us for dinner, including my ex-wife Mary and her partner Art. We are nothing if not a modern family and we most often do these gatherings with some convocation of prior spouses and friends of the family. This particular gathering was a combination celebration of Evelyn’s performance and the 70th birthday of my ex-wife Mary. This three generation gathering is happening in one form or another, as we speak, all over the world, and is in many ways the essence of life. What could be more important than acknowledging the continuity of existence in the family by celebrating the healthy aging of one generation and the moving forward of another?
When the meal was over and the birthday wishes were sung, we all said our goodbyes, and all went our separate ways. Mary and Art got in their car and headed back to their home on Long Island. Youngest son, Thomas, got on his bicycle and rode back to his apartment in Brooklyn to retrieve his dog Hank from doggy day care. Daughter, Carolyn, her husband, John, oldest daughter, Charlotte, and today’s star, Evelyn, got in a cab for the short ride back to their Brooklyn duplex. And Kim and I got in our Uber, yet again, for the ride back into Manhattan.
In the movie Singin’ in the Rain with Gene Kelly, where he does his famous tap dance on the rainy sidewalk of New York, the story is all about transition. It is about a love triangle amongst people trying to move on from silent films to talkies, which occurred a century ago. There was nothing extraordinary about our family event today. These sorts of gatherings were taking place in Brooklyn a century ago. There was certainly nothing extraordinary about the weather, it was probably raining a century ago as well. And there was nothing so very special about the theater or restaurant venue, both existed in early 20th Century New York. We could have been in Des Moines, Iowa or Brooklyn, New York. The important thing was that we were together and everyone was feeling good and enjoying the moment, and that is the basis of human happiness. It’s not whether we were hot or cold, wet or dry. We celebrated life and the transition from one generation to another. And here’s the thing, this same scene will go on over and over again in years ahead with different characters, for different reasons and at different venues, but its all the same, one hundred years ago or one hundred years from now. It is always the ordinary events that create extraordinary pleasure. It is the sort of thing that makes one want to go out and start singing in the rain.