Meeting Leslie Gore (Part 2)

A second famous person who I met while driving a taxi was Miss Kitty Carlisle, the epitome of urbane sophistication, actress, singer, a fixture of New York's high society, native of New Orleans and widow of Moss Hart. It was about a decade after the Bacharach/Dickinson encounter and I was at that point driving as an independent subcontractor, i.e a lessee of passenger sedans in the Black Car Industry. Also radio dispatched, the call went out on a drizzly weekday evening to go to an address on East 62nd Street., if memory serves, near Park Avenue. The wait for her to come to the cab was rather brief and she was as remarkably pleasant as she was beautifully dressed in a black dress with pearls, a small beaded pocketbook and an umbrella that was slim, black and the handle of which sparkled in somehow, an understated way that called to mind the old line: "if you have to ask the price, you cannot afford it." Miss Carlisle did not engage in chit-chat, and yet her amiability was received unmistakably with the simplest exchanges related to our business: "Driver, do you think it will rain again later?" And then as we approached her destination a mere four blocks away, "Driver, shall I take my umbrella?" "I did not hear the weather forecast, I'm sorry, Miss Carlisle." Used to making a decision with or without sufficient data, she gently handed the umbrella to me and smiled with a "Well, I won't be especially long, driver." I sensed that she did nothing that was not purposeful or well considered. It was not raining at the moment and she apparently wanted to make an appearance unencumbered by this very special bumbershoot, its elegance not likely to mark her as cautious and mundane. Still, she chose a calculated risk and entrusted me with this nonpareil accessory with no further fuss, actually, no fuss at all. I appreciated her confidence in me. There was an atmosphere of excellence that her brief presence was responsible for constructing, and I was resultantly unafraid to have become the keeper for this inestimable, personal item of this iconic lady.                      

The rest of the trip was uneventful. Miss Carlisle returned to the cab in less than twenty minutes and she was as pleasant as before, but she seemed to be thinking intensely about whatever she had just experienced. I was glad to have remembered returning her umbrella to her before she had to ask for it  and she proffered the fare along with a gratuity that was of a stylishly, slightly more than average amount: I can only characterize it as tastefully generous. She bid me a good evening and it felt as if she meant it. The term "cloning" had not yet been invented, but the concept occurred to me that evening and I fondly imagined a world where those of Miss Carlisle's character could be reproduced instantly and voluminously.                                      

Next, if I may proceed and eventually, anachronistically, a relatively recently eight and a half years ago I read a newspaper ad announcing the appearance in a CD/record shop in a neighborhood in Brooklyn where I was formerly employed, of the former pop singer and teen sensation, Miss Leslie Gore. She was scheduled to sign her autograph on her then, newly issued copies of a CD of her latest songs. I had clearly crossed over to the waning years of middle age with its also waning exuberance, but the chance to meet her in person presented itself and the convenience of the leisure that that particular day's scheduling afforded helped me to overcome my ambivalence about the event. In fact, my courage was no doubt bolstered by inviting two equally long-in-the-tooth pals (who also remembered the thrill of this cute, diminutive warbler of love songs of our pubescence) to come along. Miss Gore was now approaching sixty. The ancient shock we had sustained when learning of her homosexuality had long since ceased to wound any of us who may have had a crush on her…at least of those buddies within my ken. And another factor was now in play for me who was only four years her junior. My shyness, traditionally amplified by the proximity to a celebrity, had developed alongside the aforementioned ambivalence, a conflicting emotion of some animosity towards such a person. Something along the lines of "why must I bow down, as it were, before you? You are not a god, you are not my king or my queen." There was not any scene of course. It was just a matter of body language and a diffidence that I imagine the star in question was sensitive to and so I remained correct though my adulation was clearly not streaming out of my pores and the celebrated one surely did not, in my presence anyway, "feel the love." I soon realized my purpose and it was rather a selfish one. I wanted a photograph of the two of us physically together to display on my refrigerator door and nothing more. This was accomplished as per the rules of the queue for seeing her and/or purchasing her CD. As a non-buying customer I was entitled to the snapshot but no autograph. With no malice for this lovely artist of my youth, I was perfectly content for what I had obtained and about what I had not. This is how one grows old, no doubt, or so I thought as I had watched a man perhaps older than myself earlier kneel down in front of Miss Gore and talk to her as if he were praying to the Virgin Mary Herself. Mine was an admixture of pity and yes, envy, that fandom could linger so insistently in one's heart.

Now skipping back in time, the following encounter marked perhaps the beginning of this aging process that I mentioned. My cousin, a wholeheartedly adoring aficionado of the classic '60s sci-fi television series "Star Trek" had arranged for dinner at a sushi restaurant in Murray Hill. She and her friends, all equally devoted "Trekkies" had spent much of that day at the show's convention in a nearby hotel. Knowing my proximity to Manhattan, I was invited to join them for the repast. A special guest (not me) was to be included as well and when told the name, my advanced knowledge of the show was proven to be not so advanced. Walter Koenig played the role of one of the junior officers of the starship Enterprise     …..To Be Continued

Meeting Leslie Gore

I have met very few celebrities in my life. Am not referring to the half dozen or so famous persons that most of us who live in or near New York's pulsating hub of world entertainment, Manhattan, inevitably over time (with the increased odds of the probability of such an encounter), come upon, glimpse and then pass by while we and/or they are in a crowd at a certain hailing distance. Some of the bolder among us may, with precise and proper timing, shout out a cry of friendly recognition and often the star will diffidently acknowledge your acknowledgement with a wan smile. That was similarly the case once when, while stopped for a red light in midtown, I espied the late Dom DeLuise strolling along, unmolested and minding his own business. My enthusiasm and courage were bolstered by the heady psychology of negotiating a couple of tons of sheet metal along a busy thoroughfare together with some percolative and youthful tendencies, despite a rather shy nature. But they were all almost immediately replaced by regret when the surprising timidity of the funny man was revealed. I had imagined he was always "on" in the role of his madcap, lovable buffoon persona. Instead, he politely nodded to me and seemed to wish that he had donned shades and perhaps a false beard that long ago morning.

No, the meetings that I am concerned with here are the especially infrequent ones that come from the happenstance of a certain degree of intimacy born of natural, social situations (like dinner plans), public and commercial events in circumscribed places and finally, the nature of the workplace for most of the jobs I have held through the years. To put it simply, and in reverse order of the above: driving a taxi or black car industry vehicle for hire, attending a celebrity's planned event in a small venue for publicity and sales purposes, as well as joining a small party of adoring fans and one of the objects of their affections at a restaurant after a convention of these aficionados of a classic television program, were the occasions for my encounters with these gliterati.                        

In 1973 I was an ectomorphic, spectacled young man of slight stature with a distinct physical resemblance to the late British pop rock star, Freddy Garrity of Freddy and The Dreamers. Unlike Freddy, an outgoing stage personality was most definitely not something I had in common with him, my brief episode with DeLuise in this period notwithstanding. It was my first week on the job with a N.Y.C. medallioned yellow cab company known as Scull's Angels and as luck would have it, my meter began malfunctioning after I had been driving for an hour or so. The radio dispatched call came in for a pick up on the east side on or near 57th Street and the party's name was Bacharach. I just wanted to drive as steadily, safely and as inconspicuously as possible until chance might bring me closer to the garage where I could request repairs or a replacement for the meter. Fact is, it was working, but was registering the increments of each fare far too slowly for the time and mileage logged. Again, business coming first, I concentrated on my customers/passengers and in this case, it was a tall, well dressed man who exited the glass doors of a tony building with a uniformed doorman at the ready and who smilingly and casually waved away the serviceman from the routine of escorting him to my cab, who was the focus of my attention. Several seconds later a radiant and very pretty blond woman approached, nearly petite but somehow big, accompanying a small girl who seemed lost in thought. The adults helped the little one into the rear compartment.  A furtive glance at them and I knew that my passengers were Burt Bacharach, his then wife Angie Dickinson and apparently their daughter. They gave the address and it was in Long Island City, a short trek over the 59th Street bridge and towards the vicinity of the Midtown tunnel's entrance via doubling back towards the East river's edge and then a left turn down Vernon Boulevard. House numbers soon disappeared as industrial buildings and overgrown weeds near an area of freight train tracks caused me, with my limited knowledge of the area, to ask for help. Miss Dickinson eagerly instructed me for the last several hundred yards until we arrived at an isolated, almost peaceful cul-de-sac with several boxcars at a railroad siding blocking any imagined exit without completely turning the taxi around. "You may stop right here, driver" said Mr. Bacharach. He exited the cab and went to a tiny office nearby to talk with an old man with a clipboard. Miss Dickinson was cooing to her daughter about a surprise and promising that "Dad will show you very soon." My professional air of circumspection was really just a cover for my anxiety about the meter and the fright of being in the presence of these gods of the entertainment world. I sensed that Miss Dickinson sensed my chary ways and while she respected my reticent demeanor, it was clear that the palpable charisma that beamed from her being could not let her ignore me nor be ignored. She simply leaned in closer near my opened partition window and naturally asked about the slow meter. I could barely speak, her perfume and pulchritude intensifying my self-consciousness. Somehow I managed to mumble about the defective meter and my plan to have it repaired, trying to sound off handed about it. She seemed about to ask another question, perhaps a personal, if innocent one, when Mr. Bacharach began walking towards us while waving his hand and cheerfully beckoning to his wife and child. They all met about halfway as the old man began to slide back one of the boxcar's doors. I was alone now and relieved to be so. A brief but high pitched shriek, the kind that only very young girls seem to be able to manage, was heard though the little one was obscured by her doting parents. Led down carefully from the car along a portable ramp was a shaggy dun pony dappled with white and looking a bit skittish. It was their daughter's birthday I learned and the day and its memories belonged to all of them as well as to me. It was only last year that I learned that this child grew up, was long suffering with physical and psychic ailments and died by her own hand in her forty first year, predeceasing this famous and seemingly invulnerable couple. It reminded me, as I have been reminded countless times since I first heard Paul Simon's tune on the subject, that I "don't know a dream that's not been shattered."  END OF PART 1  

To Soothe

Dialing "on" the warmth of my electric baseboard heater quickly gives relief, pure physical, "ah" producing relief, much like the gulping of a chilled, sweetened drink on a summer's day pushes aside, together with the happy sound of clinking cubes of ice against my tumbler, and at least for several unadulterated seconds, any discomfort, physical, psychic or even existential. To freeze reality, and nearly so, in the case of one's hot, parched gullet, is the imagined ideal. Similarly, a sustained, toasty balm in the form of a heating element enabled by the magic of electricity, and as serviceable as the ancient hearth, is embraced and hoped for as the agent of a bliss unending  A long winter is wished away along with its incessantly delivered, below freezing temperatures together with my habituation, through idleness teamed with weariness, of wearing indoors, cheap, damp Red Chinese- made footwear, long after their use during the shoveling of snow, ice and slush. Quiet cursing gives way to determined action as I slip out of these boots, their cracked, highly permeable and deteriorating soles having allowed the wrinkling of my toes to a repulsive degree only barely tolerable because of the season's temperatures' inhospitableness toward mold. Prayers follow curses (when I have donned an acceptable pair of old, DRY, U.S.A. made galoshes) and they're directed toward not only Old Man Winter's speedy demise but also his misery spreading tools of destruction: the tons of the gray, granular melange of urban snow/gunk that my ally, Old Sol helps me to send again, on its way to oblivion with halite, a big, strong push broom, sturdy snow shovel and a gravitationally well positioned sewer drain.

But what's the big deal? Am I a Finnish trooper in the winter of 1939-40? Must I keep moving, ever moving, mindful of the deadly cold and Soviet marauders? Am I a member of the Donner party, trudging and eventually staggering as hideously as if I were on Mars with my oxygen tank nearly exhausted and with unspeakable horror casting its shadow? Am I a homeless urchin seeking an even more vulnerable, missing sibling in the streets of New York during the White Hurricane of 1888? No, of course I am not. I am simply the extremely very late middle aged author of this blog entry and one who has permitted himself to be seduced by the powers that be that proclaim that every instance of inclement weather in North America is a calamity warranting one's undivided attention via their megaphones of uber urgency: televison, radio and the internet. Once upon a time, news and certainly weather were laconically communicated topics. This was when television was in its infancy, as was I, and technology and money were concentrated in our defense budget, the production of steel, oil,  agriculture, housing, rail, roads, automobiles and other essential industries and not on mass media and the marketing of fears and speculation: a kind of endless "Chicken Little, the sky is falling!" mantra of continuous melodrama and yes, hen clucking and hand wringing or a jazzed up yet Johnny-one-note narrative of only slightly sophisticated gossip, delight in phony drama and the creation of angst. Peace and quiet are the enemies of the gods of national, nay global communication. Dead air is abhorred and stories of problem solving Americans (our true national pastime) are always subordinated to those of mayhem or natural disasters or even, increasingly, natural phenomena like a snowier and colder than normal winter.

Well, yes...warm, dry feet and the wolf, meteorological or literal, that is persuaded or driven from my door is newsworthy to me. Yet, the soothing is best done by me and mine. Good friends and neighbors as well as family keep me most honestly and more lovingly informed about what is happening. That boob tube remains just that-- something that gives me more than a slight headache after repetitious broadcasts and predictable, unpleasant stories about stupid, criminally inclined and greedy people. The media folks' attempts in recent years to also exploit the weather for their interminable loop of tales designed to instill a kind of constant craving for their pronouncements, more than announcements, is having its effect. But like any addicting entity, the power of "no" is one we needn't be afraid to use. It's just snow. And when it's furiously falling, with news mongers galling, I'll keep patiently stalling 'til the sunshine is calling.