Up front here I’d like to say that a perfectly reasonable feeling about this little entry would be that I’m waxing all enthusiastic about doing some stuff that normal adults in the vicinity of a large city do like all the time, and that I Must Not Get Out Much. That is entirely true: I Don’t Get Out Much. But when I do, I love it. :)
The Employer gave us Friday off randomly, and because the day before Friday was Thursday I was going to be in the office (being on the Tuesday and Thursday phase), and on a whim I looked around on the Interwebs for some interesting-looking live music different from the handful of jazz clubs that I’ve been to in the past, and I found the Rockwood Music Hall on the Lower East Side, which (although described in a number of confusing different ways on the Interwebs because it’s changed over the last ten years) looked like it would have at least three different live acts on Thursday night.
Promising M that I would try not to bring home either Covid, RSV, or bedbugs, I found a good deal on a hotel room at The Allen Hotel nearby, and satisfied myself that there were numerous restaurants around, and packed for an overnight on Thursday morning before leaving for work.
After work, I checked in at the hotel, which is a cute boutique place with a small but two-storey lobby with a glittery chandelier, fancy modern TVs with all sorts of electronic affordances (USB, power, HDMI, maybe Ethernet I forget, etc, etc), and an outer door that locks at 10pm so don’t forget to take your keycard with you.
I then wandered out into the LES and found The Spaghetti Incident, a tiny an excellent Italian place that I recall having eaten at solo years ago. It was just as tiny and excellent as I recalled, and this time at least half the place was taken up by a party of a couple dozen, for whom most of the tables had been pushed together, wearing like tuxes (I think they were tuxes) and nice dresses and so on, and when someone new arrived they would enthuse and clap, and they sat there eating and talking and looking very prosperous and white the whole time I was there.
That was sort of neat; I wonder if some of them were someone famous or something.
After a delicious Tagliatelle al Porcini (which I can’t find on their online menu, oddly) with a glass of Pinot Grigio I think it was and a positively ethereal Tiramisu, I slipped out into the night without asking the fancy people who they were and what they were doing there, and went to find the Rockwood Music Hall.
The Music Hall turns out to be two doors in a completely undecorated windowed storefront on Allen Street. One of the doors has I think a rather dark logo on it, more or less invisible at night, saying “Rockwood Music Hall”, and two rooms, one a tiny deserted lobby area with a restroom opening from it, and the other being an almost-as-tiny intimate brick-walled space with a bar on one side, a little quarter-circle stage (“stage” in that it’s maybe six inches higher than the rest of the floor), two or three tiny tables, and enough bar stools in addition that maybe two dozen people can sit at once.
On the stage was a grand piano where Andrea Wittgens was sitting at the keyboard singing, with her friend Lena Kaminsky perched on a stool also singing. I got a Manhattan from the bartender (having Googled “drinks that all bartenders will know how to make” beforehand to avoid that thing where you try to order a drink that you know only from a fifty-year-old song and the bartender has no idea), and perched on a bar stool by the windows, and was just in heaven. I mean, seriously. I was practically bawling by how perfect it all felt.
Last I remember feeling that particular feeling was listening to Susan Werner at Joe’s Pub sometime a billion years ago. (So yeah, I guess I like singer-songwriter at the piano! But there was also Nataly Dawn singing La Vie En Rose that time at the Bowery Ballroom, ah bliss.)
After Andrea Wittgens, the next act was Teenatown, a petite young woman in a sweatshirt like three sizes too large for her, with a band of I think two guitarists and a drummer, enthusiastically singing loudly to loud music and being amusing between songs. That was fun, if a bit loud in the confined space for my old ears, and afterwards she gave out baby carrots to the crowd and I asked her what that amazing patter was in the middle of one of the songs (it was a Nicki Minaj rap / patter) and she thanked me for coming, which was all fun. I nursed a second Manhattan during her act (two-drink minimum!) but stayed surprisingly functional, given that a glass of wine and two Manhattans is about three times as much as I’ve drunk in Some Time.
The final act that I saw (I think there was another one after, but it was getting to be my bedtime) was Ayden Skye, whose long velour dress suggested she might be doing torch songs, but whose extensive band (didn’t even fit entirely on the stage!) were mostly amped rather loudly, and she was mostly more rockin’ than croonin’, but still very enjoyable, and with endearingly friendly banter in between songs. She did do one or three numbers with mostly piano and violin, and naturally those were my favorites because I am old and staid and sentimental.
Oh and then Ms. Skye said “Okay, I’ve got an encore, I’ll need you,” pointing at friend Shannen Bamford who had sung with her on a song or two, and then pointing at a guy who was somehow associated with the music hall or something, and they both came up, Ms. Bamford looking a bit confused, and Ms. Skye stepped off the stage, and the man took Ms. Bamford’s hand and started talking about how wonderful these last few months had been since meeting her on this very stage, and everyone was all like OMG and pointing their phones at them, and he got down on one knee and proposed and she said yes and everyone was all wowwwww.
And that’s not something you see every day!
(Those images up there are going to collide badly on many displays, aren’t they? Oh, well!)
This is getting long, isn’t it? :) Anyway, then I toddled back to the hotel, surprisingly steady on my feet, and collapsed into the bed, which was just fine, and slept until some time or other in the morning, waking up in time to be leisurely about getting myself back together and still get out by the 11am checkout time.
I’d thought about just making my way slowly back home, but I also thought hey, I’m here pretty much at loose ends in the greatest city in the world, and maybe there’s something else going on! I’d picked up a little pamphlet-for-tourists in the hotel lobby just for fun, and it mentioned a show on the Harlem Renaissance at the Met (i.e. the Metropolitan Museum of Art), and I thought hey I could go to that!
So I headed uptown. The rest of the morning was spent having entirely too much brunch (French toast with berries and maple syrup, and a big bowl of delicious tomato soup) at Friedman’s Herald Square, and then up to wayyyy uptown (there’s so little graffiti up there, it’s bizarre!) to the Met for the show, which was very large and very excellent, and I’m not remotely qualified to talk about it. The Harlem Renaissance, which was part of a whole international flowering of Black art and intellect in general, produced lots of amazing stuff, and we should all know more about it.
The show was (to my untutored eye) very well curated, with big text on the walls explaining to us what we were looking at, placing it in context and pointing out relationships, and generally holding our hands while also not getting in the way of the raw art and artifacts we were looking at.
(One thing the show didn’t really cover was why the period ended; the answer appears to be mostly the Great Depression, which in Harlem in particular resulted inter alia in the 1935 riot.)
Doing all that (all while carrying a heavy backpack full of overnight things that the museum didn’t want me to check because I said yes it has considerable electronics in it) had me rather exhausted, so I sat at a little in-museum cafe up on the balcony and got some Ginger Beer and a pain au chocolat (although I was still pretty stuffed from brunch frankly), and then gathered enough energy to walk and subway over to the 125th Street MTA station and catch a train up to home.
And I slept really well the next night. :)
(Somewhere in there I also bought a random used book from a street vendor, because of course I did!)
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