Why Can’t We Have Fun Again?
March 18, 2009
Winter, 2002, Davio’s in The Biltmore. Buddy and his constituents holding court, heavy handed drinks, people with an easy laugh, money in their pockets, a scam in the works. It seemed like everybody was getting laid and actually enjoying it. Brown University Professeurs, seeking tenure but completely confident of their future sipped champagne cocktails in the love seats and requested songs with suggestive lyrics. The Davio’s management, happy with the flow of money into their cash register, let the evening unfold without comment. The gays and straights and rich and bohemian and uptights and East sider and West siders crushed together in a frenzy of freedom from the Same Old. It was a true Cabaret room where all castes congregated, sharing bad jokes, sing-a-longs and lousy nachos. The young and beautiful students. the Brown intellectuals, the tourists, groups staying at the hotel for a conference — Turf Masters of America, a Mortician Convention — dull herds of men from Milwaukee and Baltimore pressing against the local Madonna-Wanna tarts of North Providence, and Voila, it’s Christmas week and Davio’s has decorated the front windows with fake mistletoe and an electric Santa and Mrs. Santa, who girate randomly until I readjust them for slow dancing and suddenly, Mr and Mrs. Santa are fornicating on the stage. The crowd absorbs the peculiarity and is amused. Nobody makes a move to separate the electric Christmas couple. The night heats up with more jazz swing tunes, heaps of snow pile up against the windows behind the stage, cars in the street are stranded in sleet. They double park and come into the room for a drink, welcomed with cheers, handed half empty beer mugs.
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Strange Bedfellows
October 26, 2008
Buddy, Artin, Dawn struggle to comprehend Cabaret
- Meatballs? Easier to understand and they taste better.
Due to a strong sense of self respect and the inability to kiss ass, I will not be at the Sidebar again. It isn’t that they weren’t generous for a couple of months and also quite kind — It’s just that they don’t get it. I felt myself getting more stupid as the weeks passed. And, vise versa, I didn’t get them. You know what I mean. I tasted the meatballs. To me, they’re just rolled up Hamburgers. Undigestable. It isn’t that anyone was wrong, it was just a bad match. You can go into the Sidebar on Saturday nights and see the perfect music/restaurant match. Don’t forget to snap your fingers to “Fly Me To the Moon!” …. Meanwhile, I am invited to New York to be interviewed for some strange Russian TV program about Jazz which is shown in 17 countries. Hopefully I will get a gig in Siberia! Google “Oleg Frish”….!! Will visit old friends at Don’t Tell Mama – and see if any previous pianists, for example, the great Paul Trueblood, are in the city, monitor my brain and see if I have it in me to go back permanently. Old friends in a loft on West 38th Street offered me their spare bedroom. But truthfully, I feel beaten down at the moment. Beat. Like a Beatnik. Christmas. Its ability to remind us of a previous Christmas, when we knew we were safe and Santa was coming. Be patient, Santa will return! Meanwhile, I’m singing at Ricardo’s in Lowell, MA for New Years Eve with Odie and Todd — Spending Christmas in D.C. with daughter – back to a couple of comedy clubs I worked last winter. Then, to New Orleans for two weeks – Newport is on the horizon and Boston, too, due to a reconnection with Joshua Jansen, Boston’s Gay Sweetheart and friend of nightclub owners all over Bean Town. It’s got to be around here somewhere. p.s. Check out Le Scandal in Manhattan, google them, I’m talking to Bonnie, there, about a spring fling.
Thanks to smarter nightclubs owners, live entertainers continue to eat well during this economic downturn. It was during the Great Depression that Cabaret and Vaudeville got their start as people swarmed into the pubs to forget their troubles for a few hours. The cost/value ratio of live entertainment suits the recession pocket book and mind-set. If you stay home and wallow about your wallet, you’ll soon find yourself in the emergency room for a failed suicide attempt, chronic depression or Epstein-Barr Virus. Without health insurance, your stress-related illness will cost you upwards to $1,000 dollars. A night out in a cabaret will run you about $50 to $75. I rest my glass of champagne.xx
Buddy Cianci radio show
April 9, 2008
Hadn’t seen Buddy since his escape from a political prison. Looks great. Harder around the edges though. Who wouldn’t be? 
His side-kick, Ron St. Pierre, is just the greatest, and together they are impossible to upstage. I tried, of course, but kept getting interrupted just before the delivery of a punch line. Read more
Where Are you Buddy??
February 10, 2008
The producer of Buddy Cianci’s radio show e-mailed me several weeks ago and said he’d like me to be on the show. He had been playing my CD version of “Rhode Island is Famous for You” and both he and Buddy were looking forward to my move back to Providence, which I have been seriously considering. After all, my musicians are there, I have best friends there, it’s still comparatively cheap to live there. There still aren’t any gigs unless you want to sing in an Italian restaurant under a hanging salami, but Boston is close enough. Newport is summer chic and 25 minutes away.
But this producer, whats-his-name didn’t return my phone calls ( six of them) or my e-mails (two) over the course of two weeks.
The percentage of unreturned phone calls per city says alot about the city itself. A legitimate phone call not returned indicates that the person is either dead or an asshole. Of course if you track them down they always say they had the flu or were on vacation, as though they forgot to check their voice mail for two weeks. Self important people often do not return phone calls. A city full of self-important assholes affects the quality of life in that city, more than weather, jobs, housing, parking, the Arts.
My studies have shown there to be high percentage of phone calls not returned in Providence, R.I. and Sarasota, Florida. Cities with the best phone call return ratio are New York City and Washington D.C. It doesn’t seem possible, does it- being that those two cities house alot of heavy hitters. It could be that the big wigs in the big cities have figured out that you don’t know what a person can do for you until you talk to them and meet them. Laurel Casey could be anybody. Their mistress’s best friend, readying herself to tell his wife about the affair. A long lost relative with information about his or her genetic code. The next best thing because a next thing starts out as nothing.
Second stringers, in smaller cities, are insecure about their power quotient. They need to leverage themselves in simple ways, like not returning a phone call. To them, not returning a phone call is a heavy duty message to the universe, let alone the person calling. The message being, “I don’t gots to talk to nobody.” or “I’ll talks to somebody when I feels like it.” You can’t argue with them. They have every right not to return your phone call and they are obviously doing you a big favor because they have told you, without words, that they are egotistical assholes. This is a time-saver.
Whoever has not returned your phone call doesn’t want to talk to you. Why? Either they have made you a promise they dont want to keep or they don’t know who the hell you are. The Top Tier guys don’t care if they know you or not, they’ll call you back. They don’t care if they have to tell you they can’t keep their promise. They do it all the time.
I prefer the straight forward approach. I prefer to be given the benefit of the doubt. I am going back to Washington D.C. this week so that I can call people and have them call me back. It is such a good feeling and worth the higher rent.
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The cop looked in the dumpster and noticed a picture of his wife. He had just received a complaint from the Olympic Sports store that someone had dumped bags of garbage in their dumpster. That someone was me. I’d cleaned out a few drawers of hometown memories that morning, – high school notebooks, graduation pictures, diplomas, clippings and headed into what I thought was a free-for-all dumpster tucked behind a strip mall. After I threw the bags into the dumpster I took a walk with the dog and when I returned to my car I was met by the policeman and the assistant manager of the Olympic Sports store. Read more »