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Marie's Crisis
Saturday, December 31st, 2011 11:53 am
Last night my friend Sam took me to Marie's Crisis Cafe, which is this singalong piano bar in the West Village. Just a dark, crowded basement with a piano in it and a guy playing show tunes. For six hours at a stretch. Mostly from memory. (He's like the Mike Bromberg of Broadway, only less surly.)
...With people packed six deep around said piano, singing at the gleeful top of their lungs. Not karaoke style; there were a few times the room hushed down for soloists (mostly the staff), but in general it's a free-for-all. Here's a NYT feature that gives you a little more of the feel of it (warning: autoplay sound).
Stupid me somehow didn't expect it to be standing-room only (I didn't understand why they enforced coat-check of all bulky coats and large bags, until I got downstairs and saw it). So after 3 hours, lurching up the stairs to the coat check with absolutely no voice left, I felt like I'd been beaten with a stick. But in a good way.
The thing about it was that, like playing Encore, it is only really fun for people who possess a large mental library of songs they can belt out at a moment's notice. (The same could be said of something like skiing; there's a distinct skill base you have to have under your belt first, in order to grasp the joy of the full experience.) Happily, however, this is a skill set I have well in hand. There were a few times when I wished I could quickly conjure up lyrics on my smartphone (left, alas, upstairs in the coat check), and a few songs I'd never even heard before; in general it definitely revealed some gaps in my musical theater knowledge. But I proudly held my own more than half the time.
And this brought to mind an insight I had a few years ago, about my habit of listening to songs or soundtrack albums over and over again until I've committed them to memory. (I particularly indulge in this tendency when alone in the car -- commuting was great for this purpose -- and conversely feel guilty when I happen to have passengers and blithely forget to change the CD once it starts over.) What I realized is this: I'm a vocalist. When I listen to a four-minute song 30 times in a row on a 2-hour car trip, it's not perseveration. It's practice. I'm internalizing them.
Which is what lets me show up and go tune-for-tune with a raucous basement full ofgay men semi-professional singers in New York City late on a Friday night. And love every minute. <3
Oh, and in case I don't get to it later: Happy New Year, everyone!
...With people packed six deep around said piano, singing at the gleeful top of their lungs. Not karaoke style; there were a few times the room hushed down for soloists (mostly the staff), but in general it's a free-for-all. Here's a NYT feature that gives you a little more of the feel of it (warning: autoplay sound).
Stupid me somehow didn't expect it to be standing-room only (I didn't understand why they enforced coat-check of all bulky coats and large bags, until I got downstairs and saw it). So after 3 hours, lurching up the stairs to the coat check with absolutely no voice left, I felt like I'd been beaten with a stick. But in a good way.
The thing about it was that, like playing Encore, it is only really fun for people who possess a large mental library of songs they can belt out at a moment's notice. (The same could be said of something like skiing; there's a distinct skill base you have to have under your belt first, in order to grasp the joy of the full experience.) Happily, however, this is a skill set I have well in hand. There were a few times when I wished I could quickly conjure up lyrics on my smartphone (left, alas, upstairs in the coat check), and a few songs I'd never even heard before; in general it definitely revealed some gaps in my musical theater knowledge. But I proudly held my own more than half the time.
And this brought to mind an insight I had a few years ago, about my habit of listening to songs or soundtrack albums over and over again until I've committed them to memory. (I particularly indulge in this tendency when alone in the car -- commuting was great for this purpose -- and conversely feel guilty when I happen to have passengers and blithely forget to change the CD once it starts over.) What I realized is this: I'm a vocalist. When I listen to a four-minute song 30 times in a row on a 2-hour car trip, it's not perseveration. It's practice. I'm internalizing them.
Which is what lets me show up and go tune-for-tune with a raucous basement full of
Oh, and in case I don't get to it later: Happy New Year, everyone!