She spreads her arms. "Sing!" they yell.She flicks her hands near her sternum. "From the heart!" they shout.What follows is three rather dazzling hours. Powerhouses, charmers, belters, crooners, one by one the campers grab the mike and try to take the room, to hit the back wall. Bvlgari Ergon Ladi Size BL-86 of them, under the pressure of a full house, fall back into the "vocalist mode" and park their humanity and vulnerability somewhere in a notebook. But even so, they're exciting to watch.Up in a balcony, I catch myself thinking about Nancy LaMott who for years was probably the best talent in New York cabaret. LaMott had "that thing, whatever that thing is." She died young, of cancer, in I995. You'd be lucky to find one out of 100 Americans who'd ever heard of her on her dying day.
At the end of the show I find Voelpel lurking out in the misty Waterford night. I ask him what's going to happen to all that talent out there. "Probably not a lot," he says dourly. "It's not an organized industry. It's a very fuzzy business. There's about maybe five that are worth a Bvlgari Ergon Ladi Size BL-87 investment."Voelpel asks if I've ever seen The Gig. No, but I know what he's talking about, a Douglas Cohen musical about amateur musicians who hook up with a professional.At the end of the show, Voelpel explains, the pro is explaining to one of the amateurs why the latter won't be able to move up into the former's ranks."It's not a religion," says the pro."Meaning?" asks the amateur."Devotion isn't enough."Voelpel says those words and, with a saturnine nod, Bvlgari Ergon Quartz Chronograph BL-19 into the misty Connecticut night.
In the weeks and months that follow, though, the most enterprising singers get a lot of work. Cards arrive in the mail announcing gigs in and around New York City. The fellows and faculty go to each other's shows. In the fall, Paula West makes her debut at the Oak Room. She stuns the audience twice, A.Lange & Sohne Lange 1 Southern Cross ALS-8 with her talent and then with the wrenching admission that she still supports herself as a waitress. And then, as if she had heard Voelpel on that late-summer night, she quotes Ezra Pound:
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