Last week the world celebrated the birthday of Lady Day, as she sometimes is called. Born in Philadelphia on April 7th, 1915, Billie Holiday became an icon of jazz and blues music. She was only 44 years old when she died of complications due to liver disease, but what a legacy she left behind. Just one song from her today, but it’s one that I love to get lost in.
Image: Gjon Mili/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
I don’t know much about Jazz, but I know about poetry, and I think Frank O’Hara does such a marvelous job of capturing what Lady’s singing does to a person. In his poem “The Day Lady Died,” he breathlessly writes about his day and preparations for a dinner that night. He creates this breathlessness, in part, with his often characteristic lack of punctuation that makes me feel like I’m listening to someone talk who is can’t stop to take a take a breath.
And then at the end when he picks up the paper with the news of her death, it hits like a punch in the gut. Here’s “The Day Lady Died” by Frank O’Hara, followed by her song, “You Go to My Head.”
The Day Lady Died
It is 12:20 in New York a Friday three days after Bastille day, yes it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner and I don’t know the people who will feed me
I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun and have a hamburger and a malted and buy an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets in Ghana are doing these days I go on to the bank and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard) doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine after practically going to sleep with quandariness
and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it
and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT while she whispered a song along the keyboard to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing
My brother Jeff used to tell a lot of stories in his Song-of-the-Day emails. And I’ve been encouraged to do more of the same. Well, this one wasn’t what I was planning to lead with today, but here goes. Those of you from Pennsylvania, may be familiar with some of the places in this story.
Let’s call him Kevin. It was the late 90’s. His friend’s name, for the purposes of this post, was Jamie. She was spunky and brilliant and a damn fine writer. They were good friends . . . and apparently more. Sometime shortly before I met the two of them, he came out to her at a very awkward moment, like I don’t think they were completely dressed. Like I said, awkward.
At that time I was working for a company in State College and badly missing my kids after my marriage broke up for reasons that did not involve either Kevin or Jamie. That’s another story from years before. Kevin and I met at work where he was a temp and I was one of the first gay guys who he felt he could talk to. We never dated, but oh man, did we dance.
My niece Kristin, if she is reading this, knows the place, as she worked there sometime later. The club Kristin knew as Indigo had over the years changed from the locally historic Mr. C’s to Players, a name it kept from the 90’s to about 2008. Players had “gay night” on Sunday, but be honest, it was a bit of a mixed, though welcoming crowd, which was instrumental, along with nearby Chumley’s in helping me to find a few new friends in the area.
Kevin wanted to be introduced to that crowd and so we went and we danced. That’s when I learned that his job and real love outside of work at the company, was dancing. That was a challenge for me on the dance floor, but he was a good teacher and I followed his lead. Only once did I pull back too slowly and took his forehead in my face. I showed up for work the next Monday with a black eye, but we laughed about it at the time.
In an attempt to save his friendship with Jamie, and maybe connect his new friends with his old, he planned a meeting between the three of us, and while I was nervous about what to expect—woman scorned and all that—I had no idea what I was in for. We met up at the former speakeasy called Spats where they had Swing Night on Wednesdays. Unfortunately, this was a style of dance I hadn’t done since high school gym class and Kevin failed to prepare me.
First of all, let me say that Jamie was a beautiful young woman, and she could dance like nobody’s business. Later, she apologized to me for our first meeting, but at the time, I was the first one of Kevin’s gay friends she had met, and she was still hurt and angry at him, so that was taken out on me. Basically she mopped the floor with me, the dance floor that is. Later, she and I became good friends who read and critiqued each other’s poetry.
But that first night was a little frightening. We were barely introduced when with a wild and bold look in her eyes, she grabbed me from the bar and pulled me to the middle of the room before I’d even had a sip of my drink. “You know the Charleston, right?” she shouted in my ear over the music. “It’s easy, just like this,” and she did the steps and kicks from the knees quick and easy to the beat, which at that moment was a very fast and peppy beat.
“Well, I . . .” started to protest, but she didn’t wait for an answer. Suddenly we were in the middle of the dance floor where I was doing my baffled best at trying to keep up with her stepping, kicking, and swinging, while Kevin stood aloof at the bar, doing nothing to help me in what felt like a dance battle to the death. We were everywhere, and it’s a testimony to her own limberness and skill that she never received and accidental kick in the knee from me. I am sure I did everything wrong while embarrassing the heck out of myself in public, but somehow I stayed afloat for what felt like a very long dance number.
Last I heard from Kevin, he said he was “lonely” in Pittsburgh. Jamie is teaching these days after having received an MFA from Cornell and a PHD from Berkley. I hope they are both doing well, and that they don’t mind that I’ve told this little story about the night when, in an effort to make a fool out of me and cause him some embarrassment and chagrin, she basically told me to “Shut Up and Dance.”
You may not know Walk the Moon, but despite a brief hiatus or two, they’ve been making music since 2006, and recently played for Penn State’s fundraising event, Thon. They’ve been unfairly called a one-hit wonder, but their song “One Foot” also did extremely well on the charts in 2017. And they even made a guest appearance on tour with Taylor Swift.
Here they are with their biggest and best known hit, from 2014. The official video is fun too, but this remix with dance scenes from movies is one I keep coming back to. And so, we wrap up a week of dancing with Walk the Moon’s “Shut Up and Dance.”
When I was in my early college days, in my early twenties, Virginia moved with me to the state of Indiana. One of our best friends there was a young lady named Rhonda, and she had a car that was “as big as a whale.” Not a Chrysler as in today’s song, but a big Buick with a flat roof, much like the one in the picture here. I don’t know if she had a name. Do you name your cars? I had Casper, the Friendly Car (white Ford Focus I bought on Halloween), Dolly Dodge, Lizzy LeBaron. Well, if Rhonda’s Buick had had a name, it would have been Bertha.
One day my car, Lizzy was in the garage, so Rhonda and Virginia brought Bertha across town to pick me up at the radio station where I was working at the time, and on the way home we picked up an extra large pizza from our favorite pizza place. Wouldn’t you know that in our goofing around and (probably) singing, we drove the whole four miles, without ever realizing, until we arrived back in front of our house, that the giant pizza box was still on the roof of the car.
Now, there’s something to be said about aerodynamics, and stability, and balance. I wouldn’t know what those things to say are, but if you want a good time that won’t make you lose your pizza, I recommend a big, flat-roofed old classic car, like Bertha.
I guess we’re going to continue where we started on Saturday with a few more days of 80’s warm-weather music to fight off the winter blahs. And yes, we definitely sang this song in that car. I recommend singing “Tin Roof! . . . Rust” as loudly as you can. It will freak everyone at work out and they’ll leave you alone. From 1989 here are the B-52s with “Love Shack.”
Jeff's Song of the Day 