The Doorman’s Diary: 11.19-20.11

Almost from the start, the jazz club started filling. An out-of-town couple seated at the bar was celebrating the gentleman’s birthday, but he wasn’t the star of the scheduled birthday party taking place tonight. That “birthday boy” arrived ten minutes later. The birthday celebrants met and ended up buying drinks for each other throughout the night. Party goers and regular customers filled the bar as the live music kicked in. A guest flute player (or if you prefer the more pretentious, “flautist”) played with the group instead of the usual tenor and trumpet. The jazz flute was refreshing. There was also a guest vocalist which added yet another dimension to the music. Two couples were moved to dance and would smoothly interchange partners so that any given time there was just one couple dancing in a confined corner. Their fluidity inspired a pronounced pear-shape middle-aged woman and a tall elderly man to dance in the area just beyond the entrance door. They were both light on their feet but required more space than their dance moves, thus the woman’s hip girth slammed into a small table with a candle, my water glass, glass coffee mug, and dish filled with wrapped hard candies that were splayed in a 180-degree arc. They paused long enough to determine if anything broke. I retrieved the candle, glasses, dish, and half of the candies while avoiding lethal hip swivels and two-step releases. They couldn’t be bothered cleaning up – guess that’s what the help is for. Toward the end of the night the cast and supporting members from a local musical theater production of Reefer Madness held their cast party at the jazz club. I congratulated one young woman on their successful run. Her response: “Thanks, but I’m not in the cast...I clean the toilets.” To which I responded, Even so...I think it was Albert Albee who correctly observed that many a creative enterprise gets its start from the perch of a clean toilet.