I think there is much to be learned as we access our sub-conscious minds and our imaginations and look at the results. Here’s one story that taught me what is lurking in my own foggy depths.
The first thing I noticed about Alice Blaine was her perpetual, frozen, unconvincing smile. That smile was pasted on an overly made-up face, punctuated by a mouth decorated with vivid, cherry red lipstick and eyes
highlighted in purple. She topped the whole garish look off with a head of stringy dishwater blonde hair that always seemed a day past needing to be washed.
But I overlook her appearance when she opens her mouth to sing. Oh Lord, can she sing! She knows all the words and music of the standards and classics from the 20s through the 40s.
When I say she can sing, you’d never mistake her voice for that of Ella Fitzgerald or Diana Krall, but she is not as bad as your average karaoke singer and better than all the American Idol rejects.
What is it that keeps us regulars coming back to Bernie’s Chi Chi Lounge night after night where Alice holds forth with Cole Porter, Irving Berlin and George Gershwin classics from 9:00 pm to 1:00 am?
It’s not her raspy voice that brings me back every night to hear her last two sets. In fact, her thirty-year habit of smoking two packs of Luckys a day and a slightly boozy sound from her two Martini pre-performance routine, added, rather than detracted, from her vocal quality.
It’s her distinctive styling of those great standards. Each word is delivered in such a plaintive, haunting, longing way that you know she understands your loneliness and pain.
To hear her reminisce with, “I’ll Be Seeing You” or lament “I Can’t Get Started With You” or the one I most relate to, “Everything Happens To Me” is to have her take you on a journey into your soul. She touches us all as we sit and absorb her magic. She communicates with us in the manner those master composers had in mind when they wrote those classics.
How is it that Alice is able to touch her audiences so deeply?
Tune in tomorrow to find out.
Byron
www.byronethompson.com
No tags
