The Show Must Go On
I am sitting on a redeye flight to New York, headed to a show tonight that Kim is singing in. She has been invited to sing at the Cabaret Convention at Rose Hall of Jazz at Lincoln Center. It’s only one song and its a duet with her pal Lennie (accompanied by Steven), which is a long-time flying configuration for her performances, but it is Lincoln Center and it doesn’t get much bigger than that. I will land at JFK at about 5am and since I have no checked baggage it is only the Jet Blue two-mile trek to the taxi stand that I will have to contend with when I arrive. I want to think of it as good exercise to wake me up, but the truth is that its a massive pain in the butt that should somehow be organized better for incoming NYC visitors. I suppose I could take a room at the TWA Hotel, which is actually closer than the taxi stand by quite a bit and then get a cab from there, but that seems too decadent and exercise-avoiding, so I’ll just hoof it at my own pace, not worrying about all the people rushing past me to gain advantage on the taxi queue.
From there I will probably still be ahead of the morning commutation traffic and should make decent time into the Cornell Club at 44th and Fifth Avenue. Kim will likely be asleep in the King Size bed in our 9th floor room, which she has occupied for two nights, getting in some NYC primping and rehearsing. I will sleep off my long night for a few hours while she goes off for her sound check and then we will go early to Rose Hall where I will hang out in the lobby waiting to give a dozen people (friends and family) their tickets, which Kim has secured and I get to distribute. I have given all of them the better seats in the clusters she bought and I will sit back in my hopefully roomy-enough orchestra seat and wait for Act II and her 10 minutes of fame.
Afterward we are going as a group of almost 25 to nearby Rosa Mexicano restaurant for a private room dinner that Kim has arranged. I find it hilarious that I have to fly three thousand miles to have a Mexican food dinner since we live in Mexican food central and I had dinner at Mi Guadalajara on Saturday and at Casa de Reyes in Old Town on Wednesday. But there you have it…fajitas, margaritas and guacamole for everyone!
I spoke to Kim twice today since I had sort of a wait-around kind of day dealing with a business call, a plumber’s visit, a visit from Mike and a conversation or two with Betty while she stared blankly out the window. Kim had agreed to sing last night at Sony Hall at a gala put on for the Make-a-Wish Foundation. It was with the same Lennie and Steven configuration and was sort of a dress rehearsal for tonight, so it made sense to accept the invitation. When we spoke earlier in the day, she was looking forward to it. Then, when we spoke before she went to bed and while I was at the airport waiting to depart, she told me that it was a bit of a bust because it was one of those galas where everyone preferred to hob-nob rather than listen to the show. She said she was assaulted by a wall of sound coming off the large audience space and could barely hear the piano or her duet partner singing. That caused them to get a bit messed up with the performance, but she said she doubted anyone noticed since she doubted anyone was listening. My comment was that she should make-a-wish that she not have to ever do that again and just go on assuming things would be better over at Rose Hall.
I’m here at the Cornell Club now and I must say that my year-long love/hate relationship with the University continues. I thought the Cornell Club was exempt from this problem, which mostly has to do with the ceding of my house in Ithaca back to a truculent University Real Estate Department that deserves to be called some sort of derogatory name that should be applied to an ingrate who has graciously received the bounty from my thirty years of top-tier giving and then repaid that with a dogmatic business-like approach to inflexibly demanding a property that they have no use for rather than take further generosity from me to allow me to keep using it a few more years (really for my kids, who are also Cornell grads married to Cornell grads). If that strikes you as a run-on sentence rant, my only justification for it is that the house passes over in three days. Anyway, as Kim has said to me, since this is actually our first time staying here in forty years of Club membership, that the club is cozier than other midtown hotels (which abound with tourists), but so, so very traditionally furnished that it screams the red and gold that is clearly Cornell (further enhanced by campus pictures all over the place). That said, the room seems comfortable and you can’t beat the location. We will be staying here again in December, so we had better get used to it.
I am at loose ends today because I thought I would be sleeping all morning and I am not. I’m kinda tired, but sleep does not want to come, so we are up and about, planning to go to lunch early. When I wondered aloud whether we would find a place to have lunch early, Kim looked at me like I hadn’t lived in NYC for almost fifty years. I know, it was a stupid question, that is one of the nicest things about New York. You can literally get pretty much anything you want at any time of day you might want it. I’m not yet sure how that will translate into our lunch plans, but we will work it out.
The bigger question for me is what I will do with my afternoon. Given that Kim has a make-up person coming here to the hotel to do her up for the show, I will either have to hang around the other common rooms in the club or find somewhere to go to entertain myself…someplace nearby. Here I am at the center of the Universe, half a block off Fifth Avenue, a block and a half from Grand Central Station and a few blocks from Rockefeller Center and Times Square. The four office buildings that I spent over thirty-five years of my career commuting to every day are all only a few blocks from here (Park Avenue and Times Square). The funny thing is that I doubt if I know a soul in any of those buildings at this point and I have zero interest in walking around to see what’s changed. It’s not any sort of pain of remembrance, but more like abject lack of interest. Been there, done that, don’t need to look back on it.
As I find myself saying more and more these days, I have learned over my 69 years not to ever look back and to keep my eyes forward. That comes from years of moving when I was a child and it is a simple survival tactic. It also comports well with my view of life, and that is to not dwell on the past, not harbor any regrets and to simply do what Kim has spent her whole life doing, prioritize the future and recognize that above all, the show must go on.