The Day I Met Sir Elton

Today is the birthday of flamboyant glam rock songwriter and performer Sir Elton John (b. Reginald Dwight, 1947). Where to start? Impossible to start. His career sort of coexists timewise with my entire life. His career has had at least three major phases.

The first phase was about showmanship and costume and outrageousness and “rumored bisexuality” (that’s as far as anyone would admit in those days). He almost single-handedly revived piano as a rock and roll instrument (it had been a major one in the days of Fats Domino, Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis). It’s seldom used as one any more even today, although it has great potential in that direction. (I suppose people associate it too much with the 1950s. Well, re-invent the damn thing, then. That’s what Elton did!)

If you look through his song catalog, it’s almost insane how many popular songs he’s written and performed. In the early years, being a child I didn’t have his LPs, but I did have almost all the major singles on K-Tel and Ronco records and listened to them endlessly: “Rocket Man”, “Crocodile Rock” (1972), “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting,” “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road”, “Bennie and the Jets” (1973), “Philadelphia Freedom”, “Someone Saved My Life Tonight”, “Island Girl (1975), “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” (1976, a duet with Kiki Dee”).   I heard his version of “Pinball Wizard” before I ever heard the Who’s, and his version of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” before I ever heard the Beatles’. And I did actually have one LP, 1974′s Caribou on a cassette tape I got at a yardsale. This one had the epic “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me”, and opens with “The Bitch is Back”, the lyrics to which for some reason appalled my parents, who used worse swear words before, during and after their morning cup of coffee.

Then in the mid to late 70s as far as Americans were concerned, though he kept turning out records, he appeared to vanish off the face of the earth. He was to come back in the mid 80s with yet another long string of hits for the MTV age. (His straw boater period, although properly speaking he was much more the vaudevillian during his glam phase).  And then he reinvented himself yet again in the mid 90s by penning musicals for Hollywood and Broadway, as he still does to this day. I’d say he’s earned that knighthood, wouldn’t you? He’s a one man industry.

Ah…but you’re wondering about the title of this post, aren’t you? Very well. This would have been about ten years ago. More than that, actually: 2002. I was p.r. director for the New-York Historical Society which was then doing a rapid-response series of exhibitions related to September 11, which the entire city was still recovering from. And Sir Elton wanted to come see the current one, which had a lot of artifacts from the actual disaster. And neither my boss nor my boss-of-bosses were available to escort him through, so it fell to me. (We blocked it off so he had the place to himself).

The most amazing thing about the experience was that I think I blacked out. Well, one of two things happened, and I’ll never know which of them it was. I was standing near the entrance desk at the top of a small flight stairs in the atrium. I saw them (he was accompanied by Interview magazine’s editor Ingrid Sischy) through the glass doors about to come in. And either they took their time and I spaced out waiting for them, or….I went into shock, which seems more likely, because the next I remember they were standing next to me, waving their hands in front of my vacant stare saying, “Hello?”

And so I took them both through the exhibit and answered their questions. They were both appropriately somber (it was easily less than six months since 9-11, I think). There was really no opportunity for me to do anything but be there for them (as opposed to something inappropriate like cracking jokes, or inviting them to come see my latest vaudeville show). But yes, thanks to the worst thing that ever happened to New York, the hand that is typing this once shook Elton John’s.

And now, a personal favorite of mine, and I don’t care who knows it:

Demons of Discord

Two NY Riots from Five Points to Astor Place
A Lecture by Kathleen Hulser

Join Kathleen Hulser, public historian and senior curator of history at the New York Historical Society, as she discusses how New Yorkers of the 19th century acted out their political passions in the streets. Fears of racial mixing and abolitionist activity touched off a round of race rioting in 1834 that left the contents of houses and churches in flames and targets running for their lives. A mere 15 years later ethnic and class tensions crystallized in the personalities of dueling Shakespearean actors, igniting protests that drew tens of thousands to the Astor Place Riot. More than 22 died and five times that many were injured, when the mayor called out the state militia for the first time to quell the disorder. Probing the causes and contexts, Hulser will illuminate the face of urban disorder in a period when politics out of doors often spelled blood on the cobblestones.

Thursday, May 12
6:30- 8:00 P.M.
Hudson Park Branch Library
66 Leroy Street (off 7th Avenue South)
Free; reservations required.
RSVP to rsvp@gvshp.orgor (212) 475-9585 ext. 35

Cornbury

I used to shill for a stodgy uptown joint called the New-York Historical Society. (Don’t ask about the hyphen). The oldest museum in New York, its holdings include the complete set of Audubon originals, significant paintings from the Hudson River School, the desk at which Clement Clark Moore wrote “The Night Before Christmas”, and relics from 9-11.

Notwithstanding the worth of those objects, perhaps the Society’s most beloved piece is an early 18^th century portrait of what appears to be a very ugly transvestite with five o’clock shadow. For years—centuries, really—people thought it was a portrait of Edward Hyde, Lord Cornbury, the colonial governor of New York and New Jersey, who was reputed to have a taste for women’s clothing. Recent scholarship has cast doubt on that habit, as well as the identity of the subject in the portrait. However, my motto has always been: PRINT THE LEGEND. As the public relations officer of the N-YHS I always at the very least privileged the legend.

Imagine my delight when I heard that two of my favorite actors, David Greenspan and Everett Quinton, would be starring in Cornbury: The Queen’s Governor, a Ridiculous style play about Cornbury’s alleged antics. Furthermore, the play is presented by Theatre Askew, which did such a terrific job lampooning I, Claudius. For this inveterate lover of history, the Ridiculous, and drag (when it’s not on me), this is a fortuitous confluence.

And I’m glad to report the product was everything I hoped for and more. Greenspan, of course, is only ever and always himself, but this role makes an ideal setting for the jewel that he is. Luxuriating around the space, eyelids halfway drawn, sculpting the atmosphere with his hands as he sings out orders to his obedient and put-upon minions, Greenspan’s Cornbury is every inch a Queen. Quinton, who’s played his fair share of similar characters too, acquits himself no less favorably as the nasty, prudish Dutch clergyman Pastor Van Dam, a character not a little reminiscent of the Hume Cronyn-inspired security guard he played in Natural Born Killers. Furthermore, the cast also includes someone named Eugene the Poogene. The rest of the ensemble are also terrific, but they aren’t named Eugene the Poogene, so I don’t mention them.

The play itself was either written in 1976 or is “new”, (both have been asserted) and is penned by some combination of Anthony Holland (who died in 1988 ) and William Hoffman, best known as the author of As Is. The play is terrific in details – the speech is exquisitely accurate and full of double entendre. But as a whole it is somewhat formless, with Cornbury being “dethroned” at the end of the first act, leaving the entire post-intermission as an anti-climax. But that’s merely the plot. Like any good comedy of its type, it is a tapestry of gags. Director Tim Cusack seems to have located them all, including many that probably weren’t there, and deftly dialed up the schtick-meter up to 11, so that when the plot looses steam, there is enough merriment to sustain our interest to the curtain. As an amateur historian, I am proud to say I didn’t learn a thing.

Through February 8 at the Hudson Guild Theatre. Tickets and info: http://www.theatreaskew.com