Ik Ook

The big weekend in Amsterdam is over: it’s Monday and wash day and recovery day. Baby Dee is on her way home.

Bimhuis was full for Dee’s show last Saturday, with a few people even sitting in the aisles. The name Bimhuis is apparently associated with legendary jazz musicians in Amsterdam, but the original venue is no longer. Bim is now housed in a box sticking out the side of a theater-arts complex reached by pedestrian ramps behind the train station.

The stage was big and arched out into the audience. There was a grand piano and a concert harp on it. Before the show, a stagehand laid a sheet of paper at each musician’s place. Good—Dee had a set list. She and the band played a radio show in the afternoon, and Dee had been worried that it would deplete them for the evening. She entered alone (as I remember) and went straight to the harp, doing one of her early songs, the one about asking the bird why it sings (“The Robin’s Tiny Throat”?). The musicians joined her gradually: John Contreras, the cellist; Alex Nielson, a ginger-haired Scot; and Joe Carvel, a bassist. I would not have thought that percussion would lend itself to Dee’s music, but Alex does some special little martial thing on “Early King,” and he has a feathery touch with the cymbals that is very effective. Plus he’s fun to watch.

This was the best-choreographed of any of Dee’s shows that I have been to. Often, with a harp, a piano, and backup musicians, it can be crowded onstage, and clumsy for Dee to move between the piano and the harp, but she swanned across the stage (insofar as one CAN swan in flipflops), soaking up the applause. She did a combination of early songs from her first album (“He’s Gonna Kill Me When I Get Home” and “So Bad” ended the first set), some of the great, driving songs from “Safe Inside the Day" (“Teeth Are the Only Bones That Show,” “The Dance of Diminishing Possibilities”), and love songs from the new album that will be out this winter (“A Book of Songs for Anne Marie”). Dee also did “April Day,” a beautiful song that makes people in the audience sigh with pleasure. (She doesn’t do it often.) She was in good voice.

Between songs, Dee gave us a Dutch lesson. Her favorite expression in Dutch is “ik ook,” which means “me too.” She also taught us “lekker” (“delicious”). A person can get pretty far in Holland with lekker and ik ook.

On my way to the bar at the break, I was accosted by Alexander and Andre, a Dutch artist-manager duo, dressed to the nines (or even to the twelves), who been sent as emissaries by my friend Ella Arps (she couldn’t make it). Alex and Andre bore gifts for Dee and me. I opened mine: it was an exquisite print, from a series called “Aladdin’s Dreams,” of a well-hung contortionist. (Dee will have gotten something in the same vein.) There were some other people there I knew, too, who congratulated me on my wisteria.

Dee did “Big Titty Bee Girl (From Dino Town)” and, thrill of thrills, as an encore she did “Pisspot,” the song she wrote with my mother. You can never tell, with Dee, whether she will leave the audience laughing or crying. I was glad that this night she left us happy.

When the show was over, the stagehands drew back a curtain at the back to reveal the port of Amsterdam.

Baby Dee in Amsterdam

Baby Dee played a terrific concert last night in Amsterdam, as part of the Holland Festival.


Hooray!

Fessing Up

The trouble with hoaxes is that once you've posted a picture of someone else's wisteria and claimed it as your own, who will ever believe that you grew this lovely yellow iris?



Now I'm waiting for the hydrangeas, and while they are making up their minds what shade of blue to be, I'm off to Amsterdam, where Baby Dee is playing the Holland Festival.

A few weeks ago, I was passing the Giant Virgin store, or whatever it's called, in Union Square and noticed that it was closing and they were selling the fixtures. So I went in and got the bin divider with Baby Dee's name on it. I was going to buy it, along with the last copy in stock of Baby Dee's compilation disk, but they refused to sell it. The divider was part of the fixtures, and only a manager could determine its price. What's a sister to do? I trudged back to the "B" section of Rock & Pop and returned Dee's album to the shelf, put the divider in my bag, and walked out disconsolately. Yes, not only do I perpetrate wisteria hoaxes on the World Wide Web and sneak into movies as a senior citizen but I am guilty of petty larceny.

I'd post a picture of my trophy, but it's not very photogenic. It's just a cheap piece of black plastic with the name "Baby Dee" on one side and the words "Hunky Dory" on the other. But who knows? When Dee is famous, it may be worth something.

Garden Angel

When last I wrote, I was pleased to have such a lush display of wisteria blossoms, but secretly worried that the flowers were too heavy for the branch, or the bungalow, to bear. I've gotten a lot of suggestions for pruning and pergolas (thanks!), but there was nothing I could do until I got back to the beach for Memorial Day Weekend. Fortunately, my neighbor ACE had taken it upon himself to train the vine. Doesn't it look fantastic?

Pergola Emergency

Can you almost smell it? I was trying to describe the smell of wisteria to someone last weekend . . . and all I could come up with was "floral." Later I thought, Candy? It's light, sweet, with just a whiff of decadence. My bumper crop is desperately in need of a little support—I had no idea that flowers could be so heavy.



The rosebush is a simple beach rose, kind of blowsy-looking (as well as out of focus), but pure in scent. The bush is covered with buds for the first time—I don't know what I did right.

Wisteria

I think it is permissible for even a modest gardener to boast when her wisteria blooms, after eight long years of vines vines vines. I'm not really taking credit for it, though I did prune this year. I made several people walk up the path to the outdoor shower and look back so that they could see the wisteria at its best. My neighbors and I are hoping that its perfume will be enough to overcome some less pleasant odors that are a feature of bungalow living.



It was Mother's Day, traditionally the day I turn the water on in Rockaway. I have it down to a science now. First, I lay out the tools. Then I go to the deli for beer. I clean up the area where you have to crawl under the house to screw the plugs into the pipes, and remove the cap from the pipe that gives access to the water line, and then—voilà!—my wonderful neighbor T. comes over and does all the work, assisted by me and a bottle or two of Budweiser. We were in luck: no leaks. I cleaned, put a fresh battery in the tide clock, which was still accurate for high tide during the full moon, and stayed to see the full moon rise over the ocean, yellow-orange, between clouds.

Next: the rosebush.

Jury Duty

I got picked for a jury my first day in Federal District Court. There were seven of us on a trial, and for days the only thing I could divulge about it was that it was about finance. During the time that we were sworn not to discuss the trial, even among ourselves, we the jury were just dying to talk about it. But we had to confine ourselves to deconstructing the various comb-over strategies of the several lawyers: one with lots of air for volume, another with a sort of tree line behind a white fringe that I believe had sprouted from plugs.

The trial was alternately stupefyingly boring and highly entertaining. The boring part was the financial statements of the plaintiffs, projected on a screen by the defense. I suffer from tinnitus, as you may remember, and most of the time I can screen it out by listening to surf or music or traffic or even a humming air-conditioner. In this case the testimony was so boring that sometimes I screened out the lawyers by listening to my tinnitus.

I liked the judge, who was visiting from Seattle, and my fellow-jurors, none of whom had been eager to serve on the jury. (In fact, anyone who seemed eager in the voir-dire was NOT chosen.) We were six women and one man, and included an architect, a teacher, someone who had sold advertising for Good Housekeeping, someone who had given her brother a kidney. I also liked being downtown, and prowled around in a different neighborhood every day: Chinatown, Little Italy, Tribeca, the South Street Seaport. Trees are such a rarity in downtown Manhattan that they have special privileges: one blossoming cherry tree was cordoned off behind a wrought-iron fence in a little triangular yard behind a Catholic church, St. Andrew’s, which itself gave me vibes of Rome, the way it was stuck in there among all the municipal buildings. Also, it had a Latin inscription at the top: Beati Qui Ambulant Lege Domini.

What it came down to was that there was a shark and a dupe, and the dupe had duped some other dupes, and those dupes were suing the shark and the dupe who had hired him. The defense dupe acted as his own lawyer. He was a nice-looking guy who never intended to commit fraud. He just hadn’t been willing to give up on this failing company that his partner had walked out on, so he hired the shark, who fingered the dupe, who invited a lot of his moneyed friends to meet the principles of the company at a party at his restaurant on the Upper East Side, and invest.

The best moment came near the end, when the defendant who was acting as his own lawyer had to testify for himself. How that works is that the defendant/lawyer wrote down some questions (on a legal pad, of course) and took the witness stand; then an extra lawyer who had been hanging around for no discernible reason read the questions to him. The oddest thing about this arrangement was that even though the defendant was answering his own questions, he felt obliged to be cagey, saying “I believe so” or "I don't believe so" instead of “Absolutely” or "Never." (At least he didn’t say "I don't recall.") By then, we had heard many descriptions of this “meeting” or “party” at the restaurant, at which there were anywhere from 8 to 60 guests, but the witness for his own defense was the first to register his astonishment at the presence of a woman eating a lobster in nothing but a lobster bib.

I entered the jury room with a single word written in my court-provided stenographer’s notebook: “lobster.” We’d already spent five days in Federal District Court, growing more and more horrified that our tax dollars were being spent like this. We threw around the subtleties of Security and Exchange law for a while. The clerk forgot to give us the evidence (thick books of financial statements), so we had to ask for it. The verdict sheet was very complicated, because there were three plaintiffs and four defendants and three charges, all of which had to be decided separately. It was funny that these extremely rich men (the shark had made $2 million on the deal, and one of the plaintiffs was said to be worth $300 million) were being judged by the likes of us, people who wonder if on their income-tax return they can deduct a $36 rubber alarm clock.

If we found the defendants guilty of violating federal law, we had to award compensatory damages, and if we found them guilty of violating state law, we could award punitive damages. We had lunch (catered from the courthouse cafeteria, from which jurors were excluded) and sent a note to the judge asking for a calculator, which, of course, tipped our hand. Then we nailed the bastards for fraud.