I've been frequenting The Carlyle since I was twenty years old, when Bobby Short played two gigs a night, when the air was filled thick with sophistication so thick one could watch it inhaled into your nasal passage and instantly straightening your tie and fluffing your pocket square as your name was engraved into the social registry. On Mondays Woody Allen would play clarinet to a crowd who was there to hear jazz and not take pictures of the Hollywood legend. When Tony didn't have to ask people to stop taking pictures, before Rosewood purchased the property and imposed draconian cover charges simply to sit at the bar.
For a while I had enough status to sit down and not be charged with said cover as I was a regular who thwarted the advances of the professionals from Eastern Europe, and was always properly dressed, even if it was in ripped jeans and an old ripped up Oxford from Prep school. Before I lived in Manhattan it was my home in town and many magical nights transpired within its walls surrounded by a pleasant staff trained in the utmost values of class and confidentiality.
Somewhere in recent times that changed. The lobby was still pure black and white marble, the staff in white gloves and starched white captain's dress but I sat down one night and there was a twenty five dollar cover on my tab. A tab which consisted of five drinks at twenty dollars a piece. And with that I boycotted the place never to return again.
Except for every Sunday in May when Hilary Kole (pictured)came to Bemelmen's. She was perfect, sultry standing by the piano in a tight black dress and Louboutin heels, the bottoms dripping red, engorged with blood pumping through her veins rubbing off on my own. Her singing follows her sex appeal while silent and there are not many who sing traditional standards with such panache.
One empty night with myself being one of three people in the room she asked for requests, walked over to my table, leaned over, her mid waist hair falling and flowing over my shoulder showing me an ear fractions of an inch away from my lips. With such an open proposition I whispered "Pick Yourself Up" of which Diana Krall first introduced me to many years ago. She pulled away and smiled, grazed my right shoulder with her thin, petite hands which sadly housed a wedding ring and uttered she would love to do such a great song.
As a man maybe I am always thinking about sex but there is a tension in this song that makes it so seductive. Maybe it reaches back to a time when women required a man who could be their provider and savior, possibly it is the want and need to have a woman behind you who will let you fail and provide the confidence to Phoenix-ily rise from the ashes to greater horizons.
I can't really figure it out and while the track I list is not Hilary's, Diana is a terribly close second. Uplifting, whether it is from the goove, the lyrics or Hilary's sultry body grazing against combinations of Maple and Hornbeam, Beech and Spruce I may never know. But there are two weeks left and if you are looking for me on a Sunday night just know nothing is going to pick me up from table seven.
