Journal: The Met Museum and Sondheim Cabaret

Woke at dawn after very little sleep (due to annoying noises all night), intending to go to the Met Museum in the morning when it’s empty-ish, only to find an offer of a proofreading job I knew I'd love, so I had to wait till noon for the messenger (sleeping mostly), but it came and then I took the bike by subway to 81st Street and biked across the Park – in shorts, a mistake, as there was a deep puddle on the transverse – and brought along carpet slippers to change into for the museum.

Saw the show on French Renaissance bronzes (which closes on Sunday), quite fine, lots of gods and goddesses and Bourbon kings (half the things labeled “model for the famous equestrian statue destroyed in the Revolution” or some such), lots of items never much seen, from the Louvre and from Dresden, and from HM Elizabeth II, having been collected post-Revolution by George IV, the aesthete king – aesthete kings like Charles I and Richard II have never been popular in England. Far too many historical errors in the signage - who, pray tell, is Tsar Paul II? and Charles I was not Henri IV's brother-in-law, he was his son-in-law. Like that, but lots and lots of it.

From that through a show on “Muses of Fashion” – great fashion models of the post-WW2-to-now era and the dresses they wore, which was crowded but did not interest me except in the last room there were half a dozen Galliano party gowns from the nineties with elegant hand-stitching in the style of Met Opera costumes from the early 1900s, and I loved those (too fat to wear them, though), and a few gown-ish photos from the 1940s and ‘50s, a strange era to me (and most of the far younger crowd, I suspect).

Then to the Francis Bacon centennial show, which has just opened and was even more crowded, so I’ll go back later in the summer. My favorite paintings were not reproduced on cards: a naked man slipping through a diaphanous curtain, and a tweed coat over a chair - but I also liked some self-portraits and a pope or two. When asked why he painted self-portraits, Bacon snarled, "Everyone else died."

Ducked through European painting to say Hi to a few friends like Velazquez’s Juan de Pareja, and overheard a bit of a lecture by a charming white-haired lady on Vermeer’s Woman with a Pitcher of Water. Then happened to pass the Byzantine aisle beside the great staircase, though I object to their signage here too: “The empire gradually came to be known as Byzantium” – no, it never did, its inhabitants always called it “the Roman Empire.” “Byzantium” was invented by a German historian in the late 16th century, because idiots get confused if you call it “the Roman Empire” as late as 1453, which I do anyway. Noticed a wonderful panel in opus sectile, just dug up at Caesarea in Israel, and a marble bust of the Empress Flacilla (who?) which looked exactly like my bulldyke cousin Amy. She will not be happy to hear me say that. Flacilla, if you are curious, was the first wife of Theodosius I, that nasty Spaniard who outlawed pagan practices in the empire in 391 c.e.

Then I biked home (about nine miles), pausing at 23rd Street to buy fruit from a Bengali (cherries, apricots, red peppers), wondering how to pass the evening - but at 6pm I fell on my bed and died. So I was up at 11, and went out at midnight. I went to Ty's, which was not interesting, and then wondered what might be interesting at that hour on a Friday night. The answer was clearly Sondheim Cabaret, where I have not been in a year or so.

Sondheim Cabaret at the Duplex (upstairs, Fridays, after 11:30) is an awfully young crowd for me, and you never know whether they're going to sing American Idol sort of stupid stuff or too many renditions of "Being Alive," but on this occasion it was actually a great success. Kate Pazakis and some fag were hosting it, and they played "Diva Tag," which is to say they sang "I Am Telling You I'm Not Going," each one emoting and then tagging the other at the most embarrassing moment, whereupon the other had to be right on the note or melisma or whatever, and this was quite funny. They also did an open sing of "525,600 Minutes," which I am too old to know (but I do). A number of volunteers shanghai'd from the floor did uninteresting songs from recent shows, and I did "Necessity" from Finian's Rainbow impressively badly if I do say so myself, and a guy finally did sing "Giants In the Sky" to assert our Sondheim credentials, and someone named Roger Crom (unknown to me) sang a song about Spanish boys and then his version of Sondheim's version of Oklahoma (Oklahomo), which was quite sublimely witty and sophisticated and well performed, and then some rather sweet little guy named Dom Giovanni who claims to be the gayest person in New York sang a dynamite Rose's Turn, and the MC attempted to flirt with a really hot hetero Scottish actor I'd never heard of who was just sitting with his girlfriend in the audience (but the emcee checked him out on Wikipedia right there on the stage), and I had had a couple of Long Island ice teas by this point so it was time to go before I attempted "Begin the Beguine."

But I was feeling full of energy on a warm New York night so I biked over Houston Street to the bike path on the river, which is fun to bike on because it is pretty well kept, no potholes to watch out for, and there was hardly any pedestrian traffic either at 3am, so I biked as hard as I liked up to 28th Street to consider going to the Eagle (I was in a leather vest and boots), but it was past 3 already, so I turned around and biked very hard to Canal Street, then home. Still not sleepy. I can always proofread crime writing till dawn.

Still haven't made the Picasso show in Chelsea. The Met has a show coming in from the Kabul Museum end of next month – yum! (Truly.)

I want to go bike around Ridgewood Reservoir before it gets hot. Never been there – it’s on the Queens-Brooklyn border someplace. Queens is full of parks I do not know. (Manhattan, the only borough I know well, is much the smallest of the five.) I wish I'd had my bike when I was in Rome.

Pickup Lines you may not have heard

"That tattoo around your (extremely impressive) bicep -- it's in Kufic script, isn't it?"
Okay, I did not actually say that to the extremely impressive torso with tattoo, sculpted beard, plucked eyelashes and broken, Arab nose on the E train tonight while heading home from "The Day Before Spring" (Lerner & Loewe's first musical, 1945, flopped -- NO SIGN that these guys would come up with "My Fair Lady") at the York Musicals in Mufti series.
But it was what I would have said if he had given me so much as a glance. He was giving glances only to much younger men. Well, if THAT'S what you're into, I thought (sour grapes, sour grapes)....
But you do agree with me, don't you, that it would have been a most original, however unsuccessful, pickup line, had I had the balls to attempt it?
He got off at 23rd Street in deepest Chelsea. Well, if THAT'S what you're into, I thought.
Nice view of wasp-waisted, big-chested torso in one of those fashionable square-cut undershirts, as he strolled down the platform.
Too tall for me anyway. (Like you believe I mean that.)

"The Day Before Spring" was not a good show (you could easily understand why it failed), but Lerner & Loewe recycled quite a lot of it over the years -- one recit turned up in the movie "Gigi." Others (a guy told me as we left the theater) are in the stage version of "Gigi," which I do not know. There are several very pretty songs in DBS worthy of cabaret recycling: The title tune, and "My Love Is a Married Man" (the somewhat well-known one), "A Jug of Wine," "This Is My Holiday." (I'd heard the second and third of these at Broadway-By-the-Year's Musicals of 1945 at Town Hall.) There's a splendid little scene in which Plato, Voltaire and Freud sing different advice (in different pastiche styles -- did young Stephen Sondheim see this show?) to a wife considering whether to leave her husband for her lover -- this is the sort of thing that could be excerpted for variety performance very well indeed, and it brought down the house tonight.

Not to change the subject, in "No Man of Her Own" (not to be confused with the Stanwyck weepie of the same title), Carole Lombard plays a small-town librarian and Clark Gable (this was years before they married) is a gangster from the city who is lying low in the small town. She is affronted by his appraising look -- or at any rate, it makes her kind of breathless. But he seems to have vanished, and she's turning out the lights, row by row, in the dark library -- when out of the stacks he emerges, looming over her with THAT smile. She falls back, and he says,
"What do you DO with all the hearts you break?" --
whereupon she gives a great big Carole Lombard gasp. And falls for the lug.
I loved that scene when I saw it at an impressionable age (I'm still impressionable, actually), and I have often used the line. Well, not often, because the first five or six times it did not get anything like Carole Lombard's reaction ... in fact guys tended to edge to the other side of the bar. So I cooled it. I only use it now on guys so hot I know they're not going to respond no matter what I say. It breaks the ice. Sometimes it's even worked.
You never know. But that's a Cole Porter show, come to think of it.
What would you say to a really stunning muscular Arab with a tattoo in Kufic script around his bicep on the E train on a Friday night?
("It's Friday night. Shouldn't you be in the medrasa?")

DBS was not the best thing I've seen at Musicals in Mufti by a long chalk (it was the opening night, true) -- I think that title goes to Rebecca Luker in "Darling of the Day" -- but the show would be infinitely more likable if the cast -- especially the ladies -- would project their lyrics, sing them louder and e-nun-ci-ate. (Like, say, Rebecca Luker.) Todd Adams, who had the best voice, had nothing to sing; Robyn Kramer, who was the funniest performer, did not project her songs. Daniel Levine was amusing as Voltaire, Hunter Bell as a valet, Tia Speros as a confidante (the Eve Arden role), Mark York got laughs where there weren't jokes and played piano good. Pleasant show to finally see. (Next in the series: Zorba.)

P.S. In the Barbara Stanwyck "No Man of Her Own," which is mercifully rare, Ruby is knocked up by a lout, Lyle Bettger, who gives her a train ticket to get rid of her. Naturally, as so often happens in real life, she's just trying on the wedding ring of another pregnant woman when the train crashes. The other woman and husband are killed, and his family mistakes Ruby for their unknown pregnant daughter-in-law. For the sake of the baby, she goes along. But Lyle Bettger turns up and blackmails her into marrying him. The whole flick's deadly dull until the moment the Justice of the Peace says, "until death do you part," and then the famous Stanwyck eyes light up. All the while, on the drive home, she is staring at oblivious Lyle, and it's perfectly obvious what she's thinking: "I'm Barbara Stanwyck. I'm married to a man I despise. I know how to handle THIS." Those five minutes are the only reason to watch the picture.
Truth to tell, I don't recommend either movie. Or "The Day Before Spring." Or musclemen with plucked eyebrows and tattoos in Kufic around their biceps.
York Theater Company, however, I approve.