Drummers are dancers who are sitting down!!

My sister LOVES to find grave sites of famous people and long dead relatives. While looking for our great-great grand mother, Susan Anastasia Marcella Goldrick Whelan, she took a side trip to the tomb of Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, a deity in my sister's tap dancing world, right up there with Jimmy Cagney, Ginger Rodgers and that other Irish guy..oh yeah, Gene Kelly. I have a theory that Irish dancing was a brief form of flamenco dancing, learned by the Irish as the Spanish Armada was camped out, poised to attack the English heretics who had left the True Church..in what? 1600? Anyhoo, the Tudors wailed on the Spanish, and they went home, leaving the Irish as the English punching bag for 400 following years..and in addition, the flamenco instruction was incomplete..the Irish never learned the arms part of the dance, leaving only the dead arm position of Riverdance. Oh well..

Singing at the SaPPHIRE!!

I like the name of the place..The Sapphire Lounge. It sounds like a club that existed in a Raymond Chandler novel, or an Alfred Hitchcock movie.
I got to sing with Margold, McDermott and Satten, no not a law firm dedicated to medical malpractice, but a jazz trio created by 3 escapees from the rock n' roll wars. Jim Satten has played with Mary Wells, Bo Diddley, Ronny Wood and Ronnie Spector, just to name a few, and Denny McDermott was with Steely Dan. Mitch Margold, who played with the brilliant guitarist Cornell Dupree and Toots and the Maytals and I got into a conversation about the worst jobs we ever had. We both had had bad vibes after playing gigs in prisons, and we decided that they were some of the wierder gigs. (Steve Marshall chimed in to say that his worse gig was at a frat house, where there was so much beer on the floor that the band was getting electrocuted everytime they touched a microphone..Toga..toga..toga..)
Anyway, we're videotaping these sessions for local TV, so every Tuesday nite at 8pm we play at the Sapphire Lounge, 249 Eldridge Street, on the Lower East Side, right off East Houston, where my great great grandparents lived before the Civil War, and before moving to Holbrook, Long Island, where they scuffled around as farmers, for a while. Their spirits are in the neighborhood, and I get a warm and fuzzy feeling just walking up to Allen Street.