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Honeymoon in Manhattan
Entry 5 of 9 | show all | print this entry |
(The Rock-It, Amsterdam, September 25, 2006)-I don't know if I told you this before, but my wife Penny fired me last summer when I was in Detroit. I'm not sure what the whole story is, since there was no discussion at all, but I know she hated Holland and had little interest in coming here to live with me. So I tried to swallow my foolish pride and accept this blow to the heart as best I could and carry on with my life howsoever it might present itself. We had been hooked up since the fall of 1979, and I had no idea of what to do next, or even if there was any more chance of romance in my ever-shrinking future.
Now I'll be 65 years old on October 2nd, just a week away from this writing, and it's hard to seek romance of any kind at this point in life. So I was cruising along in a state of unwelcome celibacy early this past winter and planning my trip to New Orleans to visit my daughter Celia for the holidays and then again for the Mardi Gras when I heard from my pal Carlo Ditta at Orleans Records. He wanted me to play a night with him and his band when I was in town for the Mardi Gras at a joint across the lake in Covington called the Green Room. We set the date for February 17th and he mentioned at some point that he was trying to bring his friend Dorothy Goodman down from New York City to be on the gig in Covington.
Carlo and Dorothy used to write songs together when he lived in New York City some years ago, and he'd been encouraging her to write and sing her songs for a long time, but her marriage and family life kept her from returning to the show business career she'd begun in the late 1950s as a teen-age soul singer and Brill Building songwriter working with other youngsters there like Paul Simon, Neil Diamond and Carole King. Paul Simon even produced her two 45 rpm singles for Amy Records, issued as by Dottie Daniels.
I'd met Dorothy briefly when she came down to New Orleans for the Cutting Edge Music Conference in 1999, but we got better acquainted in New York City in September 2001, just following the World Trade Center attack, when she sang with me at a couple of engagements Carlo had set up there to celebrate the release of his compilation The Orleans Record Story, for which I'd composed the liner notes.
(420 Café, October 13, 2006)-We felt a strong attraction for one another that night but didn't do anything about it because both of us were married and didn't do that. I always had a warm feeling when I heard her music or saw her name, but that was as far as it went.
Now Carlo was trying to hook us up again in New Orleans and, as it happened, we started corresponding by e-mail and I was urging her to come on down to New Orleans by Valentine's Day to play the gig. It turned out that Dorothy was unable to make it due to a family emergency at home, but at this point she confessed that she'd been in love with me ever since we'd last met and volunteered that she would like to be my valentine whenever it might be possible for us to get together.
My response was that I could really use a valentine right about then and, unlike 2001, this time I happened to be available. But there were the logistical considerations: I was headed back to Amsterdam after Mardi Gras and wouldn't be back in the States until the end of June. I was booked to fly to Newark and on to New Orleans, but I decided I'd just get off in Newark and spend a few days with Dorothy in New York City before heading down to Baltimore and out to Westminster MD for Common Ground on the Hill the first week of July.
When I was back in Amsterdam (the period covered in my Spring 2006 Travelogue) our correspondence continued to intensify. Then the gig at the ComFest in Columbus OH came in and my schedule was altered again, flying to Newark on June 22 and on to Columbus, then back to Newark on June 27th to spend four days with Dorothy at the little West Village office/pad of Bob Fogelnest, Esq., a great friend I know from Amsterdam through our mutual pal, Bob Baldori.
Bob had very generously offered me the use of his pad when I got to New York and authorized its function as a temporary love nest for the two old people in love, so everything was simply lovely when Dorothy and I finally got together and we spent four beautiful days getting to know each other in the flesh, so to speak.
What an incredible thing, to be in a flaming love affair at this stage in life! When my wife fired me last summer I figured that was going to be it for me in terms of love, companionship and conjugal bliss, and then this incredible woman walks into my life and takes over!
I don't know how much to tell you about Dorothy, but she was born on a plantation in South Carolina on V-E Day, May 7, 1945, and named Victory Day Goodman. She grew up in New York City and became a teen-aged singer-songwriter billed as Dottie Daniels, working in the Brill Building with young songwriters like Neil Diamond and Paul Simon, who produced her two 45 singles for Amy Records in the early 1960s. Then she married a military man who frowned mightily on her show business career and quickly brought it to an end. She retreated to family life in Staten Island, where she raised four terrific sons who are now 24, 26, 28 and 30. Along the way she also acquired a Ph.D in psychology and, after her husband passed away, began involved in a gospel music mission in Brooklyn headed by Mother Pointer. She started writing songs, along with her memoirs, and singing in public again, and now she sings with me!
In New York City in June we had a strenuous performance schedule in addition to our personal exertions at Bob's pad. The first night, Tuesday June 27, we played at Union Pool in Brooklyn with Ryan Sawyer's band including the great Daniel Carter, Matt Heyn on bass and the other Matt on trumpet. On Wednesday evening we were at the Bowery Poets Café, just the two of us. And on Thursday night we were back in Brooklyn at Frankie's 457 restaurant in Red Hook with Daniel Carter, Dorothy & myself, garnished with a fantastic set by Professor Arturo Pfister, the Poet Laureate of the 6th and 7th Wards of New Orleans.
We spent a lot of time with the Professor on this trip, much to our delight. We had a little trouble initially getting connected: Arturo had offered to pick me up at Newark airport-he's staying in Stamford, CT where he even has a car-but he was waiting inside and I was waiting on the curb for over an hour when I gave up and took a cab to the gig in Brooklyn. The next night he got caught in rush-hour traffic and couldn't make the 7:00 pm starting time at the Bowery venue, where I had wanted to feature him with Dorothy & myself. But everything was straight by Thursday night, and he made the gig perfectly at Frankie's.
So many of the things I do in America now have their genesis in friendships I've made in Amsterdam. Bob Fogelnest I know from here because he comes over to defend clients in the International Court of Justice in den Haag. When I go to San Francisco I'll be staying with Jim Epstein, whom I know from the Cannabis Cup, and we'll be driving up to Seattle for the HempFest in an appearance arranged by Brett from Apothecary Seeds, Don E. Wirtshafter and Zoey, all of whom I know from the Cup and associated activities here in Amsterdam. In Memphis it's Laurence Hall, President of Skinny Dipping in America, Inc. and in Little Rock it's Dottie Oliver, publisher & editor of the Little Rock Free Press; I met the two of them one night at the 420 Café.
I have quite a few friends in Brooklyn, including Larry Weissman from the old SF White Panther Party and the great painter Steve Lewis from DC, but my newest friend in Brooklyn, Frank Falcinelli, I met backstage at a Black Crowes concert at the Paradiso in Amsterdam last spring. He enjoyed my work when I sat in with the band onstage and invited me to do a performance at his new restaurant in Red Hook, Frankie's 457, promising a small stipend, a great meal and elaborate tokes. It was really a wonderful night and we hope to return soon-hopefully at holiday time this year.
While in NYC we also got to hang with my boy Dimitri Mugianis, the Iboga man from Detroit who's beginning the push to establish the Herbert Huncke Wellness Center in Manhattan, our pal Jerry Poynton, the ebullient Judith Rahilly, and I can't rightly say who else. On Friday night Arturo drove into town and picked us up for the long ride up to East Nassau, where we would join Bernadette Mayer and her peoples-including Dave Brinks, all the way up from New Orleans-for the annual 4th of July picnic and poetry gathering.
Let's close this episode with an excerpt from Professor Arturo's classic poem, "My Name Is New Orleans":
I. Communion
My name is New Orleans...
My name is Jim Crow and Old Crow
I am the Old Guard in a New Wave
I'm a Schwegmann shopping bag fulla okry
I am Larry & Frank and Morgus and Chopsley
I am the Negro League and the Urban League
I am a SOCIAL AID AND PLEASURE CLUB, incorporated
I am the Original Illinois and the Young Men's 22s
I am the Bunch Club and the Beau Brummels
I am the Busy Stitches
I'm the Autocrat
I am snowballs and carnival balls -- doubloons, octoroons and quadroons
("I ain't Black! I'm a Injun!")
I am the Yellow Pocahontas and the Wild Tchoupitoulas
I am 110 degrees in the shade of a genteel Magnolia
I am the "Duke-Duke-Duke-Duke of Earl..."
I am Ed Screamin' Teamer and Shelley Pope
I am Uncle Henry DupreÑz and The Great MacNutt
I am the Dew Drop Inn and Frank's and Hank's
(and the original Chez Helene)
I am a circle of clouds dancing in the hurricane's eye
I am a star, laughing with a Mississippi moon
I am Jean Lafitte and Al Scramuzza
I am memory
I am legacy
I am history
I am the Deep South (the Dee-ee-ee-eep South)
I am "2-4-6-8- We don't wanta in-te-grate"
I am Pontchartrain Beach and Lincoln Beach
I am Lemann #1 and Lemann #2
I am St. Louis #1 and St. Louis #2
I am Contemporary Arts Bread and Blackarts crumbs
I am soft drinks and hard times, magnolia trees and second lines
My name is New Orleans.....
I am Nellie Mae, Ethel Bell, Flora, Aunt Sweet and Willameena
(My name is Greenhouse)
My name is New Orleans...
New Are-leens
N'awlins
New O.
Latest Comments (3)
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The Nearness of You... (reply)
Oct 15, 2006 01:29 EST by captain
You old goat you. As heavenly strains of Ella & Louis' rendition of Hoagy's most artful 'get down song' fade from the air waves of - WWNO!... I am smiling, as you so warmly proclaim earth's greatest truth... Love Is Always Coming!... 'yea.
When first I read of your and Penny's (or rather, Penny's) desolution - I would have been happy and honored to be amoung the first here to speak up an... show all
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Victory Day (reply)
Oct 14, 2006 08:21 EST by iniusa
How about posting an image of the lovely Dorothy Goodman? Love springs eternal for the hardest working poet this side of the universe. Thanks for posting the Professors excellent New O poem. Y'all on tap for St Marks New Years poetry marathon.
INIUSA
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