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A Stardust Melody: Saturday Night at the Stage Door Piano Bar No joke: A piano player walks into a bar. He drops his bag behind the piano, orders himself a drink, flicks on the spotlight and settles in at the keys. “Happy Saturday night, everybody.” Not really sarcasm, this greeting, just old habit. There’s almost no one here yet, just the bartender and a lone couple in the dim candlelight at the back of the room. The bass player must be running just a little late (surprise). “Welcome to the Stage Door Piano Bar.” The first notes are still hardest; best if they’re familiar ones. “Seems like old times, having you to walk with...” For a song or two he’s alone with his thoughts, a historical re-enactor sitting here in costume at this elegant little relic of a bygone downtown era, probably a bit of relic himself. But he can’t help it: He happens to prefer the old pop songs–the Rogers and Hart and Hoagy and Porter and Frank and Judy and Billie–and he likes playing for people who love singing them. The very sort of people who are now starting to trickle in, thank goodness, dragging barstools over to the piano. God bless the regulars and the stalkers. And the singer friends with nothing better to do after a gig, or on a night off: Vern, Maria, Jordan, Prudence, Yolande, Jody, they all said they might be stopping by. The after-theater crowds from around the corner should start showing up soon too, and then cast members. Nothing like a few theater people to set the evening on autopilot. And Katherine too, back in town for a visit from New York City, home to the last storied remnants of this vanishing enterprise: the Carlyle, the Oak, the Metropolitan, the Rainbow. It makes him smile to think this was probably his grandparents’ idea of a fun night out: dressing up and heading downtown for fancy cocktails someplace swanky with music and singing and maybe some dancing, a place where it didn’t matter if your duet partner was someone you’d known all your life or someone you’d just met. It didn’t matter, as long as people had the common language of popular song and were just out to have a good time and weren’t too squeamish about hearing themselves sing and didn’t want a microphone even if there had been one to offer, which the pianist was always loathe to do anyway. He knew what a single blowhard with a mic could do to a room, the perfect time for a pianist to take a preemptive break. But tonight: so far so good. The room gathers momentum like a Chrysler on a hill, the piano player in the driver’s seat, his foot barely on the gas, a chatty gal pal on the passenger side grabbing the wheel from time to time. Another night with fellow song lovers and anachronists and mixologists and hopeless nostalgics. Nice work if you can get it, he thinks. No joke, but a dream perhaps. Tickets and info at: http://fitzgeraldtheater.publicradio.org/events/ Dan Chouinard, host
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