Last night Claudine and I went to a cabaret show. Ohh, life is a cabaret as you've probably heard, but this was a real life cabaret show. Can I just take this moment out to say how weird the actual word cabaret is? The more I look at it, the more it looks wrong. Anyway, we went to see Maria Vee at Danny's Grand Sea Palace Restaurant, Piano Bar & Skylight Room Cabaret. We are not big players on the cabaret circuit (if indeed, there actually is a cabaret circuit), this is not something we often do. Actually, we have never done it before. But Maria Vee is actually Maria Verdeber who is a grade school friend of Claudine's and Bobby's Godmother. So off we went into Manhattan.
Maria's show was at 7:00 and they had a deal where you could pay for a prix fixe dinner that would include your cover charge ($15) and drink minimum ($10). So we figured that we would just eat dinner there beforehand and then watch the show. Little did I know that you could order real food in that actual cabaret part of the building. Somehow I find that rude - to be eating while someone is performing. I guess I would never make it on the dinner theater circuit (if indeed, there actually is a dinner theater circuit). The problem I have with eating in these trendy restaurant is the portions are always too small for me. I love to eat a big dinner, especially if I am paying for it (I realize I pay the the food I eat at home - you know what I mean). I order Stuffed Jumbo Shrimp. There were 4 not-so-jumbo shrimp on my plate. Perhaps it is not the season for jumbo shrimp, but when I see the word "jumbo" I want something big enough that the waiter has to struggle to lug it to my table. I want shrimp the size of the ones that grabbed Dick Cavett's face in Beetlejuice. And they weren't so much stuffed with crabmeat as they were crabmeat blobs with shrimp stuffed into them. And they were very good. Claudine had the Scallops Provincale. They were bay scallops in sauce. I don't know what made them provincale. I didn't get to try them because they were gone before I had a chance to turn around. See, she started getting nauseaous on the ride into the city - I do drive a little "aggressively". So once we got to the restaurant, she puked. I mean, she puked in the bathroom. She didn't just barf on the hostess. Anyway, she was starved. That little fetus is really stirring up trouble. All in all, our dining experience was very nice. No kids, no being rushed, we actually ate and talked. Real conversation. A rarity, that our schedules and choosen lifestyles don't allow for very much.
After dinner, we were supposed to go right into the cabaret as we were told that the "doors open 1/2 hour before showtime". This did not happen. We waited around for about 20 minutes in the piano bar. Finally, we got into the room (ahem... I mean, cabaret) and we seated up front at a very tiny table with two very uncomfortable seats. And we waited another 20 minutes for the show to actually start. The small stage held a black grand piano and a mic stand. A pianist came out and then Maria was introduced. She has a wonderful voice and has an way of connecting with an audience. My problem is that most of the songs were real downers. She poured them full of emotion but they mostly tragic love-gone-wrong songs. Even the three or four uptempo "fun" songs ended with a twing of tragedy or sadness. Literally, all the songs were about love, how important love was, how she can't have a true love, how she wants true love, how all the good men are gay - there was even a song about how the man she loved turned out to be gay. I wonder if the life of the theater person is really underscored with this sadness and tragedy all the time.
The show lasted about 50 minutes. It just seemed longer to my ass because of that chair. Maria was wonderful in her performance. Afterwards she came back out in the room to talk with the people who came to see her. It was kind of strange to see her present her "ditzy blond" character to an audience and then two seconds later talk to her in the audience as "herself". It turned out that she had held the show those 20 minutes because her parents were stuck in traffic on their way into the city. They left at 4:00 PM from about 45 miles west of NYC and didn't get there until 7:15 PM because of some problem in the Lincoln Tunnel. After the show was over, someone in the audience got a call from someone who was still stuck on the ramp down into the tunnel. We left at 4:20 PM, but took the George Washington Bridge. Made it by 5:15 and we would have been earlier except the police shut down the northbound side of the West Side Highway right at 46th street where we wanted to turn left.
