My night on stage singing with Mandy Patinkin
Friday night, Susan said, a little of the ‘old Jim’ came up and out on the stage as I sang and joked with Mandy Patinkin…No joke. Actually happened, for real.
First, some explanation. I’m very fond of many different forms of music, including Broadway show tunes, and Susan and I are fans of his acting gigs and his CDs - and we’ve seen him in concert several times, and he’s just amazing.
When there is not much in New York theaters to hold his attention, Patinkin takes to one-man shows and national tours. The concerts are almost frenetic affairs, running more than two hours without an intermission. On Monday there were all sorts of gorgeous and familiar songs, like Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “If I Loved You” from “Carousel” and “Trouble” from “The Music Man,” but also tunes less familiar that rely on words and words and words to put them across.
Patinkin has very good diction so little is lost. He may spit words out or caress them with tenderness. We hear the poignant phrases, the bitter ones, the amusing ones, even the sentimental ones, but there is also toughness, delivered with fierce intensity.
Although he dressed in tennis shoes, drank water from a bottle after most songs, made lots of jokes and told stories, when he was in the middle of a song or medley, of which there were many, he created a world unto itself. Patinkin knows how to package and to sell.
That he does. His standards are very old Tin Pan Alley, Rogers and Hammerstein, and Sondheim. If there’s anyone who managed to turn me on to Sondheim (an acquired taste) it was Mandy. And active and fierce and funny is all a part of the show…you have to see him do Beat Out That Rhythm on a Drum (from R&H’s Carmen Jones) to understand what a human whirlwind looks like.
This time, he was playing the College of DuPage (nearby community college) and so I went in and got tickets for me, and Susan, and Susan’s mom, Connie. Connie’s a big Mandy fan as well, and this was a special treat; we’d talked many times about our experiences at the concerts, and Connie, off in South Dakota, just gnashed her teeth - but this time, she could sit up on the front row center with us.
Meredith wanted to go too (we’d seen him a great deal in the last couple of months as Rube on the series DEAD LIKE ME on Showtime), but was distracted by the prospect of her favorite (and rarely used) babysitter and her best pal in her preschool (who was coming over to be co-babysat) keeping her busy that night.
As to the seating: we were looking for something that was comfortable and would seat my wide butt nicely, and those were the seats they offered. No extra money (though the tickets weren’t cheap), and the best view in the world. Sold. And it was remarakble, because we got those seats pretty late in the day; I’d stalled around to actually go over and buy the things, and they could have sat me back a little bit in any event.
We got there in plenty of time, and he’s a little late starting. But he rolls in, carrying two baskets of flowers, and launches right into the mateial, heckling a few people who came in late.
Patinkin’s latest CD is “Celebrating Sondheim” and while he occasionally performs Sondheim in concert, most of Patinkin’s shows this fall are “pops,” in which he sings a mix of the material that he’s covered in seven solo recordings. He performs on a bare stage with his longtime pianist, Paul Ford.
“I do new things, old things and chat with the audience,” he says. “If someone comes late, I bring them onstage to sing with me. We just have fun.”
Well, in this case, he asked the first late couple what held them up, and they replied “Hockey”. He said, “that’s definitely a new one”; when the next couple came in late, he went on about “so were you the goalie?” Roars of laughter, and the poor people had no idea as to what this was all about.
Without seeing the man himself you miss half the dimension of the performance. But ah, to see him sing, to feel those eyes on you as if he saw you alone in the midst of the audience …
About two-thirds of the way through the performance, Mandy started going on about a piece of Berlin’s that was unrecorded that he and his accompanist were going off to do for PBS on Monday, and he needed some help from the audience for sound effects for the song (making horse-like klip-klop noises with your tongue). He passed over one young woman, and pointed at me, told me to try, and dragged me up on the stage with him.
Then he asked where I was from, in front of 800 people. “Dayton, Ohio.” I replied, projecting my voice and trying hard to dispel any stage fright, which luckily didn’t do me in.
Note for the readers: When I was in high school in Dayton, I was a acting and singing start of the stage. I won several awards, and wanted to pursue it in the University of Dayton, but quickly found out that while it was a lark to me, it was Dead Serious to the theater students, and They Didn’t Want Me There. So I stopped trying out from the seriously hostile reactions, and preserved the theater touch to my ‘why being a lawyer suits all of my talents’ file.
So, yeah, I do know what to do with myself up on a stage. Never mind that my voice has sounded crappy for the last couple of years, and that I was fighting of a terrible cold; I’m projecting away like mad and trying not to sound too much like a dope. I don’t do extempore stuff well, so I was at Mandy’s mercy. Connie (my MIL) said that she thought he was scanning the audience and looking for someone who would react well…
Back to the story: Hearing that, Mandy asked me how did you get here? Long story, I replied. He nodded, grabbed his chair, and settled in, telling me to go ahead as he listened raptly.
Oh crap, I said to myself, knowing the story all too well, and determined that the quick answer “my ex-wife dragged me here from Ohio because we couldn’t find jobs there and we landed them here” was not acceptable. I don’t discuss my ex in public, and certainly not that kind of public. You don’t describe your cockroach infestations to your friends, do you?
So I (very briefly and with as much flair as I could muster) told about getting out of law school, not finding a job, and my mom suggesting that I look into working for the Feds. Then getting the EPA job, and then the ‘we don’t need a lawyer, we need a computer guy’ part. Mandy made cute comments to me and the audience about ‘we sure could use less lawyers’ (they howled) and when the current gig as a webmaster came up, he made a comment about EPA’s *um* lack of committment to getting things done in a serious way.
Now, there’s a dilemma. Without going into details, my opinion has always been that there are plenty of politically inclined managers who are less interested in seriously going after the bad guys, and more interested in appearing to be good little bureaucrats. And God knows who from the office is in the audience, and what crap I’d get into. So I let it slide.
I was sure I was boring the pants off of everyone. Susan and Connie, meanwhile, were out of my sight, and (the first trick of not being paralysed with stage fright is not to focus so much on the audience) and just finding the whole thing hysterical. And apparently, so was the audience.
So then, we got into this song. About halfway through all of the tocking, I got terribly dry, and Mandy stopped things, and grumped stagily about my tocking not being up to strength. I mentioned that I was dry, and he dragged out a glass, filled it with his water jug, and I took a slug, and got back to tocking and clopping. At one point, he told me to sing the lines, and I poured out my tenor, and Susan said I sounded terrific as we sang together.
At one point soon after that, he had inteded to cut back to him singing and me tocking, and I went a little too far, and he responded with a stagey rumble to get back to work with the tongue, and so I finished that with him, we got a big round of applause, he gave me a hug and sent me back.
The rest of the show was understatement to me after that; there were a couple of melancholy pieces that he did, especially the very last encore, that shook up and stirred up those Black Dogs, but otherwise, it was the most fun I’d had in ages.
The clincher was afterwards, when a huge number of people laughed and congratulated me and said I was incredibly natural and good up on stage, and was I a plant? Hell, no. We ended up staying around and got his autograph, and he said something to me about thanks for being a good sport and all that.
Hell, I was thrilled. I think. I’m still off in left field about it.
Fighting off the cold Meredith gave me; feel draggy and stuffy - you know, the usual stuff. Meredith decided to stay home from school on Tuesday, saying (off the top of her head) that ‘Daddy says that I have to stay home today and get over my cold’ before I had a chance to say anything of the sort. The minx. At this point, all three of us (Susan came down with it Saturday the 15th) are gummed up with the cold. Ever try to use a CPAP with a clogged nose? Doesn’t work that way.
My major unfun thing this week was to go off to Loyola on Thursday at lunch to get the chest X-Rays to see if anything’s there. Really, I didn’t have much of a choice. Not doing it would not have helped anything; getting the x-rays will either (hopefully) lift the shadow or give me a better idea of what’s going on. Even if it’s bad news, not having the thing done would not have helped anything.