[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
bud powell - “tea for two”
10” - 1950
in midtown on a bright spring day; still cold, but not the bitter chill of january and february. hobnobbing with the jet-setting crowd, laughing as we push through the throngs of tourists - don’t they know how to walk any faster? - we’re playing hooky, we’re catching a matinee (student rush, always the best), we’re sitting in hotel lounges and not ordering anything; the high life by proximity. we watch children stare up at the buildings and live vicariously through their wonder.
grab a drink at the campell apartment (make sure we’re not wearing sneakers!) at 5:30, right as the wealthy get ready to catch the trains out to westchester and fairfield. the prices are outrageous, of course, but damn the expense, we have jobs - let’s mortgage the future to pay for the present, like they did. you put on your glasses and do your best dorothy parker, I scowl and knock back my rum with a few bon mots and I’m every liberal artist’s dream of hemingway. the night air turns nippy but we walk back crosstown to catch our subway, you, me and bud powell, coy interlopers for a day.
late that night, I dream of the first times I can remember seeing the city, pressed up against the window panes of the train as it crossed the bridge. A stray thought: “my children will never see the world trade center,” and when I wake up, I am crying. you are still asleep, and our stereo has quietly moved back to bill evans. I shut it off, wipe my face and crawl back into bed, and my dreams bring me back out into manhattan.
Played 12 time(s).
May 08, 2009, 12:53pm Comments
