The exercise worked, shifting Lynn out of sis-boombah, stagey bonhomie and into the kind of vulnerability and personal candor so prized in cabaret.For days, the great singers have been accused-in the nicest tones possible-of hiding behind their talent. The less-than-great singers have been Bvlgari Ergon Automatic BL-77 urged to consult their sheet music for the actual notes Mr. Kern wrote.Actually, there aren't that many less-than-great singers present. Almost all of the 35 are singing professionally. Many of them are also holding down day jobs. They're working in the FAO Schwarz phone room. They're buyers for gift shops or public-relations directors or movietheater managers. Quite a few of them have dabbled in the business of preparing or serving food to people.
Looking around the group, Carleton Gillenwater, a tall, fey ex-dancer from Santa Rosa, California, grins and says, "We could've started the restaurant of death with the talent we've got here."The most obvious star-in-the-making from the class of '96 is, in fact, a waitress. Bvlgari Ergon Automatic BL-78 West, a San Francisco jazz singer on the cusp of stardom, makes ends meet by waiting tables even as she readies herself for a two-week gig at New York's Algonquin a mere six weeks after the conference ends.For all the faculty's compulsive tinkering-Bvlgari Ergon Chronometer BL-17 extends to sending Judy Garland impersonator Tommy Femia up on stage to unbutton the blouse of a student named Maeve Spain while she sings, not passionately enough,
a Gershwin tune-nobody messes much with Paula West because nobody can figure out how to make her better."She has that thing, whatever that thing is," says Ellsworth.Wednesday is also full of angst from the previous night's chalk talk by Fred Voelpel, a deeply crusty and misanthropic Bvlgari Ergon Chronometer BL-76 designer, who told all the campers, in a plenary lecture on physical appearance, that most of them have been walking around for days looking like hell's charwomen.Flying in the face of the symposium organizers' crypto-Esalen assurances that this is a safe place to dismantle the grillwork, to strip off the polish, to peel away the showbiz mask, Voelpel tells the campers, "People are judging you all the time."
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