The Great American Saloon Series/The Showboat Lounge
Brookhiser, Richard
Americans of that continually). Thus Posner, when he sensed his own people flagging, could defend the insufferable Soviet emigration policy toward . Jews (if there really is such a thing) by telling...
...The only rule of the house seemed to be, two songs to a customer...
...A few Seattleites began to catch on...
...Herein lies the reason why the Seattle audience overcame their own blowzy sentimentalities, not to mention the producers', and injected hardball politics in spite of themselves into this people's summit: They could do no less, given that the whole idea was to "put human faces behind the super-powers...
...El 30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1986...
...Indeed, the local New York Times stringer reported recently that Cincinnati yuppies were fanning out thereabouts in search of cheap old houses...
...if there is a class system, we're all in it together...
...They were also pretty fancily dressed for a neighborhood night spot: the gentle-men in jackets, many with ties, the ladies in sweaters and pantsuits of unnatural fibers, designed for the "fuller-figured" woman: going-out clothes...
...He gave his game away, though, in the last chapter, when he posited a classless class, consisting of artists, writers, critics, academics—in short, Fussell himself and the slyly flattered reader...
...Everyone else was perfectly pleasant, carrying his tunes competently, and clearly delivering his words...
...I soon saw—and heard—why...
...Bring your keys, just in case...
...Keith Mano has suggested that the only chance people have nowadays of breaking out of their media-battered passivity is The Rocky Horror Picture Show...
...Every hour or so, the atmosphere got so thick, I had to take a coatless turn up and down the sleeping, wintry hill, just to stay awake...
...I recently fanned out for some music and a drink, and found the Showboat Lounge...
...Iftfji b 11101Of THE SHOWBOAT LOUNGE by Richard Brookhiser Once upon a time, when Cincinnatians wanted to frisk, they would slip across the Ohio River to Kentucky for low-rent sin...
...Not so fast, Paul...
...I don't know if the right of performance extends to visitors...
...I thought everyone in the place was Lucille's age, until my wife pointed out they were simply all overweight...
...A few years ago, the critic Paul Fussell wrote a delicious, bitchy book describing American class traits, such as fat, with the precision of Audubon painting birds...
...That men are in a certain sense a creation of their political (as distinct from economic) systems was revealed anew when the Soviets simply could not understand our insistence on the importance of the right to dissent, to quarrel with our government and among ourselves...
...We Russians, one said, have no "need" to dissent, because everyone is in agreement with Soviet policy...
...The cigarette haze glowed with the light of neon beer signs on the walls, including fly-over brands like Genessee, and, in honor of the season, a pair of four-foot tall holiday lawn ornaments—a red and white candle, a snowman—flanking the piano...
...The local passion for chili is so all-consuming that a Cincinnati politician successfully defended himself against a charge of soliciting for prostitution by arguing that, when he had asked the undercover policewomen for a "three-way," he was simply proposing a friendly bowl of chili...
...THE GREAT AMERICAN SALOON SERIES...
...One woman was totally out of tune and pretty awful ("Bring your keys next time, honey," Lucille admonished her...
...I had gone to the Showboat because my brother-in-law was playing a gig there with Lucille O'Neill and Her Crazy Rhythm...
...The rhythm—the drummers and the bass—was not so crazy, but my brother-in-law (cornet) and a moonlighting high school band leader (trombone and baritone) were quite good...
...Even the gabby Posner was for once quiet...
...Fat had aged them in my eyes...
...Politics] is something fundamental through which each person asserts what he is and what he wants to become...
...The front room is a restaurant, with Volunteer Police Department Chili Cook-Off trophies in the windows...
...The bar is in the middle, the lounge is in the back...
...Andy Warhol promised we would all be famous for fifteen seconds in the media age...
...A damnable offer, which has meant in practice that no one can be famous for more than fifteen seconds...
...The sin in towns like Newport is gone now, but the rent is still low...
...In-side, they've never heard of the Surgeon Richard Brookhiser, managing editor of National Review, is the author of The Outside Story (Doubleday...
...But he was followed over the course of the evening—and the evening went till 1:30 in the morning—by eight or ten other patrons...
...young weight is a characteristic of the lower middle class...
...If this can be the lesson gleaned from "A Citizens' Summit," then let's hope Phil Donahue and Vlad Posner put on more of them...
...And anyway, a woman retorted, "your government listens but doesn't hear...
...Sure...
...Lucille O'Neill herself—massive, energetic, 69 years old—banged out standards on a quaking upright, and called out the titles in a gravelly voice...
...There is a small dance floor (brush up on your Lindy), and a larger and more interesting menu than you might expect...
...They now seem more stereotyped than ever," a nurse said, "because they all said the same thing...
...The Americans then could have gone home satisfied that Russians are human beings too"brothers under the skin...
...And the fact is, the moral , values politics embodies are what we're all about, what gives us our human faces...
...Would talking about fishing or bossy employers or alcoholism have helped erase this stereotype...
...Bellevue, Kentucky (just up the hill from Newport) is not the sort of place I typically go...
...The Showboat sits half a block from a railroad track...
...Still, most of the patrons of the Showboat were pretty long in the tooth...
...But the most poignant moment came when a Seattleite asked what the Russian counterpart to the American Dream was...
...I dare say, it's not where you typically go either...
...But he had never been to Bellevue, Kentucky...
...All of them, in their five minutes on stage, were treated like stars—introduced by the trombonist, given a little fan-fare as they came up, and a cheer when they finished: house attractions, every bit as much as Bobby Short at the Carlyle...
...From Leningrad there came only puzzlement, a profound, uncomfortable silence...
...Which is a good thing...
...But they wouldn't have learned what they need to know most: the vast difference between the Soviet vision of the nature of man and his place in the cosmos, and ours...
...Then one remembered how Isaiah Berlin describes the product of modern totalitarianism: "individuals who never know or have forgotten what douceur de vivre, free self-expression, the in-finite variety of persons and of the relationships between them, and the rightof free choice, difficult to endure but more intolerable to surrender, can ever have been like...
...And only politics, Raymond Aron pointed out, can reveal this difference to us, because it "concerns not only our society butourselves...
...The first time, I thought the singer—a bowed, white-haired man—was being given a special dispensation, perhaps to celebrate his birthday (most likely, his seventy-fifth...
...Thus Posner, when he sensed his own people flagging, could defend the insufferable Soviet emigration policy toward . Jews (if there really is such a thing) by telling them (he certainly wasn't telling us) what he knows isn't true—that Washington's policy is the same for American citizens who want to emigrate to an "enemy" country...
...One was excellent: a suave, sweet voice, and a powerful stage presence, pro-jected from an improbable prison of flesh...
...For at every third or fourth number, one of the audience would get up and perform...
...We'll soon have fewer Americans asking why the cold war is still around...
...General...
...They did pop songs of the three-decade chunk from Benny Goodman to just before the Beatles...
...They were stumped by an idea like petitioning for change and scoffed at the pickets they were shown marching in front of KING TV...
Vol. 19 • April 1986 • No. 4
