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music in the Spiegeltent
Sunday, July 20 2008
Gretchen had been comp'd four tickets to "the Spiegeltent" at Bard College, so we went there tonight with Penny and David. The Spiegeltent is a charming temporary structure with elaborate stained glass windows, high tech lighting, and seating for a mid-sized audience of wine drinkers. It's the sort of venue where one expects to see jazz or, perhaps more appropriately, whatever music was playing when Renoir painted the Luncheon of the Boating Party. The atmosphere of the Spiegeltent begins outside, where lighting is low-key, ground-level, and beneath large trees scattered among picnic tables. There's a vendor selling ice cream, and there are smart, happy people sitting around talking, half-hidden in the shadows. Inside, there's a bar and tables and booths populated by an older (but photogenic) crowd. The booths are all named after large European cities. To our right (house right) was Edinburgh, and to our left was Copenhagen. We were Paris. Something about the warm, up-tempo lighting made the Spiegeltent feel a little like a good trip on a dissociative psychotropic, and when the youthful members of a proto-jazz/ragtime band called the Blue Ribbon Boys started playing, I was reminded of nothing so much as the Restaurant at the End of the Universe. Later a thunderstorm passed by outside, but all it did was send ripples along the tent's inner layer of velvety fabric.
The Blue Ribbon Boys was just the warmup act for Howard Fishman, a pathological name dropper who was a bit outshined by Mazz Swift, his Afro-Amazonian violinist, who has a great voice but was only allowed to sing a lead vocal lasting five to ten seconds. Meanwhile we were drinking rosé wine and eating the sort of kibble designed to feed humans in their natural saloon habitat.
Meanwhile Gretchen was off doing the social outreach thing, and several people I either knew vaguely or not at all joined us in our booth. I could tell I wasn't being sufficiently social because Gretchen was reprimanding me openly about it in a way that reminded me of the mildly unpleasant scolding Bathtubgirl used to engage in when we'd be out in public.
On the drive home, Penny played us a bunch of tunes by Amy Winehouse. Each song was another step deeper into character, and by the end it was hard to believe that this old tortured African American soul was being channeled by a white girl in her early 20s.
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