V o lu me T h i rt y O ne , N umber 3
From Sports Bar to Supper Club
March 2017
When I was 10, my cousin Mort told me about By Marvin Weisbord Frank Sinatra, a skinny singer in a “Every place is given its character by certain patterns of bow tie who had events that keep on happening there.... The more living the teenage girls patterns there are in a place… the more it comes to life as an “swooning.” By entirety.” 1947 Sinatra was —Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building doing the week’s top 15 songs on Photo by Mary Graff “As soon as we hear a song we haven’t heard since a particular Your Hit Parade. MIST Y WITH MUSIC, Birch Clothier’s time in our lives, the floodgates of memory open…the song My parents listened, face reflects the feelings of many who shared has acted as a unique key unlocking all the experiences associBeaumont’s first Opera Night in the Bistro and so did I. But in January. ated with the memory for the song, its time and place.” mostly we loved —Daniel J. Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music Broadway musicals. We had vinyl albums from the golden age of musical theater: Oklahoma!, Carousel, Annie Get Your Gun, Finian’s Rainbow, Kiss Me, Kate, Call Me Madam, Guys and Dolls. My first college roommate put on Bessie Smith, the blues, and jazz. By the time I graduated, I had dozens of albums. I favored pianists— Fats Waller, Teddy Wilson, Nat “King” Cole, Earl Hines, Marian McPartland. (I also banged away futilely on the piano to no avail until, at age 70, I started serious lessons with professional jazz players.) I did not know my future included the Bistro, a Beaumont amenity that surprised me when Dorothy and I arrived in 2014. I met Dining Services Director Rose-Marie Hines, who told me how hard it was Photo by Richard Stephens to get people into the newly-opened HOUSE FINCH HUDDLES in a cherry-blossom bower during March snowfall. Bistro, conceived as a sports bar. BISTRO continued on page 6
Brain Theory and the Bistro