"charles gave an excellent reading and throat-singing at the si senor celebration…"---diana senechal, editor & publisher, si senor
now, let me tell you something, dear friends. doing poetry readings can be nerve-wracking at times, especially if you've never graced a particular stage, but to do it another city totally, well, that's the end to all ends.
it was a first time for me this past weekend to perform in new york city. i'd already conquered austin & huntsville, texas, philadephia, pennsylvania, los angeles, venice & san francisco, california, lafayette, indiana, portland, oregon, chicago and the surrounding suburbs of illinois. but new york city, new york? wow, i was nervous.
it's like one of those things you don't really prepare for. i mean of course, you can practice & practice until you think you're ready & then you go and perform & you screw something up. i decided for this performance, this time to try something a little different & that was to write a brand new poem especially for the event. i haven't done that sort of thing in years.
i used to do that when i'd perform on radio programs & i'd write something tailored for the radio audience. in radio you can do that, people tend to use their imaginations & you can dress however you like, nobody will see you except for the deejay, the engineer & the entourage you've brought with you.
in person, it's a different story. people can judge you based on the way you look alone, as in shape & clothes one wears & forget the rest of what one performs. one of my vocals teachers used to ask me to take off my fish hat when we were in a lesson because it made her laugh all of the time & she couldn't concentrate! little things like that can make or break a voice without the voice ever having been broken to begin with.
other things can throw off a performance too, such as being at the event on time, which that afternoon, was looking pretty grim for a while, while waiting for a train down in the subway & those can seemingly take f-o-r-e-v-e-r! it was about 1:30pm when i decided to grab a cab & get to the bowery poetry club. for me, being there on time was extremely important.
my other nerve-wracking & major problem was the fact that it took exceedingly longer than usual to warm up my throat, due to the double whammy & combinational facts that my host’s apartment was saturated with extremely high humidity & once i hit the street, my throat met with cold, windy conditions. ahhhh, spring in new york, how lovely, i thought.
in between walking through washington square park, taking the train to central park west & catching that cab to the bowery, i did my utmost best to push, pull, tug & tweak my throat-singing up until I got it to sound semi-perfect.
The show went off without a hitch. Everything seemed to work fine. The other performers were great & the musicians sang funny songs with funny lyrics.
After the show, as i hung around & spoke to the other performers, exchanged & autographed my two spoken word & music cds; errorwrist: nine muses of error in underconstructualism & my wife is the universe caw! caw! caw! caw! (both by the way are available for $10 each. for more information, email me at: sid_yiddish@hotmail.com) with the other two musicians, virgil shaw & felix constanza, each revealed a secret to me.
virgil told me that if his guitar-playing didn’t sound so rusty, he would have invited me on the stage to throat-sing, while he strummed along. felix wrote in the booklet of his former band granfaloon bus’s recording entitled lucky curtains, “enjoyed you charles. you gave me confidence.”
later on that evening, as i caught a train from grand central station back to my host’s apartment, i saw an elderly chinese man stroking an er-hu (two-string chinese violin) in the subway. naturally, i began to throat-sing along with him. at some point, he looked up at me, mumbled something unintelligible (probably, something to the effect of, “hey, get your own space!) & kept on playing.
it didn’t matter much to me. i was happy. the chinese man, virgil, felix & diana all made my weekend complete!
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