coyotegoth | Your basic delightful evening, and All That Jazz.

Well, all right- the first part, where I heard how we've reopened several accounts (which is probably going to crimp my style vis a vis piano barring for a while), that certainly wasn't the delightful part. And hearing how a coworker got lectured by our boss for something I tried to prevent (a supervisor who really needs to be introduced to a jar of honey and some fire ants made him do a job he had no business doing, despite my attempts to point same out; it didn't go well; our immediate supervisor got flambeed, and shared the love. Gahh.), well, that wasn't it either. But then I got to the piano bar...

(Let me digress for a moment: when a wee lad still walking the straight and narrow, I sang for our church choir, and a lovely high voice I had. Then, the hobnailed boot of puberty trod upon me, and Things Were Never the Same. In deepening, my voice also flattened; my music teacher once told me I had a monotonous, buzzing voice, and in exactly those words. I've worked damned hard to learn how to modulate my voice's inflections since then (as well as gutting my way through ten years of musical theater, up until I graduated college, usually in ensemble or nonsinging parts); several people have complemented me on my speaking voice; "monotonous" and "buzzing", need it be said, are the comments that have stuck. Teacher, I'd like to save some of those fire ants for you... but I digress from my digression.

When we go to the piano bar, from time to time, someone from the audience will get up to sing. I've never done this there; it's been ten years since I sang (other than group singalongs) in public; when I sing to myself, walking home from work, I still hear the uncertainties of pitch, the hesitations, the forgotten lyrics. I feel music within myself- at times, I can feel the muscles of my mouth and face working to express it, and no doubt look like I'm having a twitching fit. reive mentioned a voice coach- if they're anything like the saint who got me through The Fantastiks (the time I played Bellamy, not the time I played Henry, which was pure Shatneresque nonsinging joy for me), this will definitely be Something To Look In To.)

Piano bar... I never know how to write about that place, and the thousand things that swirl through me when I go there. The social intimacy of leaning across a table, delighting in the staff's slyly making fun of One of the Great Unwashed; a damn well-sung version of "My Heart Belongs to Daddy"... and, of course, Enemy Mine. Damn near closed the place out; walked

reive and

ladypeculiar to a cab, then headed north because, well, I was wearing a black raincoat (very Robert Mitchum, although his were usually tan), and it was raining, and you have to walk in the rain in a raincoat like that, even if only to Fourteenth Street.