After a week of hard drinking, I go to meet Valerie at a vegan joint in the East Village where everyone looks sober and reasonable. This makes me incredibly nervous. I've managed to arrive early, again. I order a coffee with "buttloads of sugar," which causes the waitress to scowl. I'm catching skeptical sidelong glances from a man at the next table over. I keep expecting him to lean in and say, "You're not really vegan, are you?" And I'll show him the beef jerky I have hidden under the flask in my pants pocket, and then the bouncer will come, slapping a fat tube of vegetarian salami against his open palm, like a billy club....

"I've always really been a believer," Valerie says, minutes later. "Always prayed. Always very much in conversation that way." She raises a finger, points up.

I actually look overhead.

"For years I've been investigating my role as a Jew."

At Juilliard, where she studied theater, Friday night performances interfered with shabbos. Graduating in 1999, she began a successful film and television career, appearing in Amos Kellek's "Fast Food, Fast Women" and "Queenie in Love," and a Law & Order spinoff. Thousands of young performers dream of opportunities like those, but Geffner was too introspective.

"I wasn't happy," she says. "I didn't really believe in the messages of some of these films. I didn't believe I was serving the world."

A year ago, Geffner dropped her film agent and instead began working on songs. She gave a trial run to some of them at Joe's Pub, performing under the moniker Val Val. It went well; there was buzz; connections started to manifest. But Valerie continued to experiment, and think. The Slipper Room show was the fruit of that effort, and also marked her first appearance-after years of playing characters on stage-under her own name. "I want to be myself," she says, "authentically. And trust - that's interesting enough.

"I'm in a place now where I know who I am. I understand clearly how to use my personal specialties for service in the world. Music is a really powerful tool for me to be a storyteller, a creator for our time."

And I'm like, "What time is that?"

"We're in a time of war, which I see as a war of consciousness." She touches her forehead, eyes closed briefly. "We're in an emergency right now. I believe we all come essentially from the same soul, but people don't realize that. The world needs unification."

She gives me a CD. I listen repeatedly over the next few days.

"Ralphie, I want you to hear this."

"If you touch my Eminem I'm gonna shoot you in the hem."

"My hem is bulletproof, kid. Now pay attention."

        How you gonna feel-
        Knowing that it's real?

That twisting, magical voice with its simple questions.

        How you gonna walk?
        How you gonna talk?

Drunk one night, CD just ended, Val's voice echoing in my head, I take out a notebook. I sit cross-legged on the hardwood floor. What I'm doing is remembering the way she spoke that afternoon over tofu. Finger raised, indicating the heavens. Finger at her forehead. Hands clasped over her heart. At one moment she grabbed hold of my knee, to emphasize a crucial idea. The aftermath of the conversation was like the aftermath of the concert, where the object of the search had eluded me. I can't imagine its intensity in retrospect. I can't quite recall it. It was evanescent, fleeting. The only way back in is through the CD.

A new song comes into my head, an anthem of my own:

        Not gonna walk no more, no more.
        Not gonna walk no more.
        Hey, Joe, what do you know?
        Got no place to go
        No more.

        Not gonna talk no more, no more.
        Not gonna talk no more.
        Hey, Ray, what do you say?
        Got nothing today
        No more.
Photo Credit: James Carlton DeWoody III


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Joshua Axelrad is completing a memoir/novel on the life of a professional gambler.

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