We had a delightful night, seeing jazz pianist Jeannie Hoffman and bassist David Friesen in their 34th season of performing holiday jazz, last night with a drummer and alto sax player in the intimate "performance room" next to O'Conners restaurant in Multnomah Village. I last saw them about 20 years ago. For a decade before that, when Hoffman was the house pianist at the Left Bank saloon, I came by regularly for a pitcher of beer, a bucket of clams, and a request of "I'll Remember April," a routine with me then. The Multnomah performance space is intimate, 40 a full house, and we had dinner, both loving our orders. I'd never heard of Jambalaya Macaroni and Cheese but it was excellent.
H is so damn busy, we don't get out often for a night like this, and it was great fun. We were seated next to a couple almost our age, whose passion is doing the Argentine Tango -- he told me all the differences between it and the "inferior" American version of the dance. I didn't realize Portland was a big tango town but he said the international tango convention is often here, that you can tango any night of the week in Portland, and a typical ballroom will draw 50-100 tango dancers.
I like Multnomah Village. It hasn't changed all that much since 1967 when I briefly lived here, the year I dropped out of grad school to "become a writer" and succeeded. Left a PhD candidate, returned an MFA candidate, first in fiction, finally in playwriting.
Just a wonderful night. And later in the month we're having a fellow in my piano class and his wife over for dinner. He and I laugh a lot. Always a good sign. We have similar senses of humor and spend a lot of before class, and even in class, time cracking one another up.
No comments:
Post a Comment