Where is the show?

I am a sick man who needs his rest.

How did Moby and the others know not to come here at eight?

Am I being screwed?

On stage, beneath the proscenium arch, a microphone stands tauntingly on its slender flamingo leg, head tilted upward, at ready.

The eccentrics mill about, buzzing contentedly. They all seem to know each other. They all seem to know each other, and to hate me. I dressed wrong. I have on the Miu Miu denim, which, although gratifyingly tight in the nuggins, seems to put off nearly everyone, eccentrics and society types and Communists and eight-year-olds alike.

Finally, up front, some activity: the background music fades and a man charges across the stage. He hops off, confers for a spell with the sound guy. Both of them are gesturing theatrically. Then the man hops onto the stage again. He grabs the microphone. He takes the microphone off the stage. The background music returns, only louder, and the buzzing gets going again.

The microphone is gone.

Ralphie is gone.

The show is running really, really late and I have no one to slap.

I've been screwed.

9.30 PM: The microphone is brought back on stage. 9.36 PM: I notice a man wearing red plaid pants. Not at all tight in the nuggins, not at all fashionable. He's surrounded by a harem of grinning chicks who keep laughing at his jokes. Maybe that guy has a bad ticker, I think, and will die in the coming six months. 9.40 PM: I begin to lose consciousness. 9.42 PM: That twenty-five-year old should try working out, man. She doesn't know how rapidly the bloom of youth can vanish. You get lonely, man. There's no cure. It is going to be too late. You cannot imagine the things that will happen to your complexion, irrevocable things. 9.49 PM: Fresh lull in the music. 9.50 PM: George Michael's "Faith" comes on. 9.52 PM: Woman beside me pipes up to her date, "She's going to start in two minutes." 9.54 PM: Man wearing a blue vest over a floral-print shirt wanders over with a pen light in one hand and a photocopied Keith Haring sketch in the other. "The original is ten thousand dollars," he cries. "Ten bucks for the copy, here. Hey!"

Valerie takes the stage at ten. We applaud. We're pretty emphatic about it. She's wearing a green, sequined, super-heroine getup that shows off one hell of a stomach. Accidentally I catch the gaze of the twenty-five year old, and I nod in the direction of the stomach, as if to say, "See?"

Bright green tiara. Green wristbands.

Valerie is a tall woman with a face full of edges and planes, almost like a comic-book sketch. She's swaying to the rhythm of the music, humming and singing over a looped recording of what I think is her own voice. An ethereal blend of old tunes, one voice over another:

        Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens....
        The Transformers: more than meets the eye....

So this is performance art. It's suspiciously like music. She goes into a second song, crooning, "Love is the answer-to every question." She's emphatic. She sings the same phrase over and over, faster and more intensely until she practically runs out of breath. This is a song called "Twilight." Valerie sings:

        Sunrise- sunset-
        My love- come get-

She continues through a series of very simple rhymes like these, but the rhythm is elaborate, shifting continuously, impossible to clap or stomp your feet to. Every now and then she spits out a flurry of sung babble, unintelligible but lovely to hear, and impassioned. You have the sense that we are searching, in these songs, for something. The object of the search is unclear. It might be the love she was just mentioning. It might be the basic cycles of day and night, life and death; or the matriarchal structure of elephant society, where, Valerie tells us, "tears are welcome." Whatever we're after, the jabberwocky seems to get closest to the heart of it, soulful little unintelligible stabs at a truth which cannot be pronounced.

Photo Credit: James Carlton DeWoody III

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