Are You Dave?

http://hoboken411.com/archives/16774

I’m trying to figure out how to repost a blog entry from Hoboken411.com, but in the meantime click the link to see the announcement about Journeyman this Thursday.

Here’s my latest schedule:

• March 1: TFL at Cabin Fever - our official first anniversary gig!
• March 6: Solo gig at J.C. Fridays, at Made with Love Organics in Jersey City
• March 9: Gordys purim show at the synagogue
• March 15: TFL Family Beach Party at “Shades,” 720 Monroe
• March 21: TFL at Liberty Science Center in the IMAX theater!
• April 24: TFL at All Saints’ spring bash
• May 1: TFL at HOPES (tentative)
• May 30: TFL at the Waterfront Museum
• June 14: TFL at Kiddiepalooza on Pier A
• June 4: Pete Seeger 90th Birthday tribute featuring some of Hoboken’s top musicians!
• June 7: TFL at the OLG Fun Fest at Church Square Park (tentative)
• June 14: TFL at Kiddiepalooza on Pier A
• July 28: Music Together at the Shipyard 
• August 4 : TFL at the Shipyard
• August 6: The Gordys at Sinatra Park 
• December 6: Annual holiday show with Howie at the Hoboken Historical Museum.

I’m especially excited about the Pete Seeger thing; I’ll be sharing the stage with some of Hoboken’s top musicians, including the amazing Boo Reiners and Elena Skye (the Demolition String Band), The Cucumbers, Abbe Rivers, and Jim Mastro of the Guitar Bar. Jim has agreed to do “Turn, Turn, Turn” with me! I’m utterly psyched. 

Notice also the end-of-summer crunch: Music Together, Fuzzy Lemons and Gordys shows, all within a two-week span. I LOVE it when that happens! LOVE IT!!!!!

As you can tell from the blog, things have been quiet. It doesn’t help that today I have an enormous sinus headache and sore throat. Not much new has been happening. The Fuzzy Lemons have been rehearsing, and we’ve played two private birthday parties so far. Our calendar is starting to fill up, both with self-booked shows and with bookings at some of the local schools, as well as the upcoming summer concerts in Hoboken.
I’m feeling bad that I haven’t done more to advance any other business opportunities beyond the Lemons, but it’s never too late to start, I guess. I’ll tackle some new projects once this headache goes away. Right now I can’t bear the thought.
I am pretty proud of a song I am writing, it’s a post-Obama song called “Yes I Can.” Listen for it soon in campaign commercials everywhere.

I’m posting this as an update now that life has picked up a tiny bit, and to bump me to the top of the Jimmasphere.

So now I’m back at work and the Fuzzy Lemons are back in the saddle, so I’m out of the winter doldrums a little. Plus, I went and saw the Sippy Cups on the 10th (is it creepy that a 36-year-old man went to a kiddie-rock show by himself?) and got to say “hey” to Paul and Rudy after the show. So that was fun.

The guy next to me at the show (who was there with his son, thank you very much) works for Bar None records, a label that’s famous for being (a) the first home of They Might Be Giants, and (b) located in Hoboken. I e-mailed him after the show about the Fuzzy Lemons but he hasn’t written me back. Oh well.

Almost nothing has happened since Jan.1. The Fuzzy Lemons have had one rehearsal, and a songwriting session. My classes don’t start until Jan 13. I’ve done some laundry, and unloaded the dishwasher a few times, and played with my kid after school.

Sooner or later I should start doing my vocal exercises: When classes start next week I’ll go from no singing at all to 12-14 hours of singing a week. It’ll hit me hard if I am not prepared.

Here’s a picture of me midnight sledding at my parents’ house in CT over the holidays:

Night Sledding

I went through all of my notes and invoices for 2008 and here are the numbers:

• 21 Fuzzy Lemons performances
• 2 Gordys performances
• 4 Music Together concerts (including the Sippy Cups and Erin Lee & Marci sets)
• 2 sing-along concerts at the Hoboken Historical Museum
• 2 Holiday parties (including one dancin’ magical Santa act)
• 38 birthday parties
• 505 Music Together classes

For a grand total of 574 hours of musical performance. That may not seem like a lot, but it’s certainly the most I’ve ever done. (And that doesn’t include approx. 3 hours per week of rehearsals!)

It comes out to an average of 90 minutes per day spent singing for children. Wow, I like that number. No matter how I may have frittered my time away here and there, I spent an hour and a half a day this year singing to kids. That’s a number I can be proud of. That’s why, when folks ask “Are you Dave?” I can hold up my head and say “you bet!”

Thank you, dear reader, for making it possible.

Dave

Shake It Santa, Shake It! from Rowmama on Vimeo.

Here’s me in the Santa suit, dancing. Really.

Video courtesy of Corinna Kramer and her husband. Costumes and choreography by Colleen Castle.

[The following was written in December of 2004. A version of this essay was published in the Hudson Current that month. I'm reprinting it here because I just did another Santa excursion, which I'll describe in a post very soon.]

Each man in his time arrives at certain milestones: getting a drivers’ license, landing a job, first prostate exam, etc. One of those milestones whizzed into view this Christmas, far too soon. At the ripe old age of 32, I was asked to play Santa Claus.

Santa does the Chicken Dance at All Saints, 12/12/08. Photo courtesy of Colleen Castle

I guess it was inevitable. I work with kids, and I’m fairly jolly, so the call was due to come sooner or later. And, being jolly and all, I said “sure!” without thinking it through. I read once that there’s a week-long training camp for wannabe Kris Kringles. I laughed at the time. “How hard can it be?” I asked myself.

Well. Turns out there are physiological and psychological ramifications that I never dreamed of.

For starters, just putting on Santa’s clothes is a complex and delicate project. The outfit in question was purchased by my friend Beth, who runs Pixydust on the corner of 7th and Willow. (Hi Beth!) It’s a beautiful costume, but not without its shortcomings. At the heart of Jolly Ol’ Saint Nick, under all the hair and fur, is an apron-like garment with a big kangaroo pouch, where the pillow or other plumping-up gear goes, Of course, the costume doesn’t come with a pillow, Beth had none in her store, and I foolishly forgot to carry one with me. So for my first excursion as Santa, on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, I stuffed myself with the fleece jacket I’d been wearing, which rode low and lumpy, more beer gut than bowl full of jelly.

On later dates I remembered my pillow, but here’s something you may not have realized: For all its’ fluffy softness, a pillow is rectangular. The top corners of the pillow jutted out of the pouch and created an unsightly “man-breast” image under the coat. I wondered (to myself) if there was anything from Victoria’s Secret that could help lessen the effect, but I quickly shut down that train of thought. The world isn’t ready for a cross-dressing Santa.

One dons the garb of Father Christmas as one would approach Scuba gear: slowly, methodically, with painstaking attention to detail and to the proper sequence. For example, do the pants and boots first, because once the tummy is properly plumped up, you’ve said farewell to your feet for the duration. Yes, I learned this the hard way. Similarly, save the beard and wig for last, because Santa doesn’t enjoy the peripheral vision the rest of us do. The world becomes a white, fuzzy, yak-hair tunnel. The comparisons to Scuba gear carry all the way through; once geared up, I found the costume to be awkward, overly warm and slightly claustrophobic.

(“Claustrophobic.” Get it?)

Plus, like a Scuba mask, my prop Santa spectacles kept fogging up, and there’s nothing more unsightly than a Saint Nick who’s wiping spit on the lenses of his glasses. Not that I could have spit, even if I’d wanted to; my mouth was always full of stray yak hairs.

Fortunately, once the costume is fully on, Santa only has to perform a few tasks; Mainly I just had to be jolly. And once I was clear of Pixydust, where I felt like the proverbial bull in the china shop, I found myself strolling the sidewalks of Hoboken completely transformed. Checking my reflection in a large pane of glass, I saw no trace of me (except maybe around the eyebrows, which were too dark and stood in stark contrast to the snow-white beard). I was looking at Santa Claus.

And here’s where the real fun began. For all of its emerging family-friendliness, Hoboken can be an anonymous place. But everyone knows and loves Santa. Everyone knows his name. Which is to say, that day everyone knew and loved me, for I Was Santa.

In my work as a children’s entertainer, I’ve found that there are two types of people in Hoboken: those who will acknowledge a grown man dressed as, say, a pirate, strolling down the street on any given week day, and those who won’t. The same held true for me on this occasion. The willing acknowledgers were an enthusiastic bunch, waving or honking, calling “hi Santa!” and making gift requests (mainly for new cars and large-screen TVs, greedy buggers). The ignorers, by contrast, hunched their shoulders, stared at their shoes, and picked up the pace as they hustled by. Naturally, they’re the ones I ambushed on the sidewalk, with a hearty “Ho ho ho!”

A word about my voice: It’s not deep. Oh, it’s deep enough, not feminine or anything, but my father has a rich, rumbling voice, and I keep hoping that maybe someday I’ll grow into one of my own. Sadly, though, it seems my larynx (like my lone dimple) came from mom’s side of the family. Years of singing in rock bands haven’t helped. So my “ho ho ho” sounded somewhat like the aforementioned pirate, and somewhat like Ed McMahon. I compensated with volume; I’m a loud Santa. I can project.

And project I did. I found myself booming “Merry Christmas” to people blocks away. I walked up to total strangers and let my jolly-ness wash over them in huge crashing waves. Wearing the costume, I found, enabled me to totally get out of myself and shed those inhibitions; to become someone else. At first it was just good fun. The guys at the Christmas-tree stand on Willow gave me a bunch of candy canes to hand out. I saw some kids I knew and delighted them by wishing them a Merry Christmas by name. (I think their parents were delighted too, but I’m not sure. Beth told me later that she got a phone call, “who is your Santa and how does he know my child’s name?”)

At one point I found myself in a local Italian restaurant, boldly ho-ho-hoing a famous actor who dines there regularly. I was in and out before he knew what hit him.

That’s the thing; I was doing stuff I don’t think I would have done otherwise. I’m a happily married man (hi honey!) and a fairly respected member of the community, at least among three-year-olds. But in costume I found myself giving in to the dark side, just a little. I was supposed to be drumming up business for Beth’s store. But it was a cold day and the sidewalks were almost empty, so I bounded in and out of the shops up and down Washington street, offering Santa’s services for parties, flirting with hairdressers and waitresses, asking who’d been naughty. Like Jack Skellington, I found out what happens when you mix a little too much Halloween with Christmas, especially in a town with so many bars.

The upside is, Santa drinks for free in Hoboken, but we won’t get into that here.

I’m happy to say I was able to spread some holiday cheer. I’ve done some parties since then, of the “kids get your picture taken with Santa” variety, in much more controlled environments. At one event in Soho in Manhattan, we shared the party space with a bunch of Jewish families celebrating a birthday. Without switching gears I wished them a Happy Hanukah in my best pirate/Ed McMahon voice. I’ve gotten a lot better at putting on the costume, and at keeping the yak hair out of my mouth. Most importantly, I think I’m better at being Santa, as opposed to just Dave-in-a-Santa-Suit.

My final exam may be coming up. There’s a voicemail waiting for me from the Mayor’s office. He’s looking for a Claus for his “Santaland” this weekend, and someone gave him my number. Wish me luck.

Oh, and Merry Christmas.

Greetings from Baton Rouge, LA, where we’ve just spent an absolutely delightful Thanksgiving with relatives. As with all good trips, this one has been marked by meals. Since we arrived Monday evening I’ve enjoyed yellow grits, spicy shrimp, chicken and sausage gumbo, grilled alligator, cajun honey-glazed maple-leaf duck, corn maque choux and crawfish wontons (and this doesn’t come close to the meal list I racked up last time we were in Baton Rouge. No frog legs this trip, for example).

Thanksgiving dinner consisted of the following:

• Artichoke mousse, utterly delicious.
• Not one but two smoked turkeys. I was in heaven, and I didn’t have to wrestle anyone for a drumstick.
• 2 dressings (what we call “stuffing” where I grew up): One was a rice pilaf with cranberries, apples, pecans and so much more; the other was a corn bread dressing with bacon.
• Fresh venison courtesy of cousin Dylan, wrapped in bacon with cream cheese. Mind-blowing. I’ll be bringing this little delight home with me.
• Squash casserole, an alternative to most yellow zucchini recipes I grew up with.
• Sweet potatoes topped with butter and brown sugar crumble. MMmmmMmmmmmmmmmm.
• Pumpkin pie (not allowed to reveal the secret ingredient, but let’s just say that 25% of the milk was replaced with alcohol - alcohol bakes out, flavor doesn’t)
• Jam cake with cake gravy.  I’d never even heard of this, but rest assured it’s utterly delicious. It’s cake made with a LOT of lingonberry jam, so it’s amazingly moist, but not, you know, jammy. The gravy is brown sugar and butter heated and drizzled.
• Cranberries and Lingonberries.
• Tums. I’m not as young as I once was.

For those of you keeping score, that’s two recipes involving bacon. That’s my kind of Thanksgiving!

I’m thankful for the incredible family I am continually discovering all around me. Even as my own blood relations continue to become more interesting with each passing year, I continually rediscover that I married into quite a clan (in fact we’re meeting a brand-new “long lost” cousin on my wife’s side in Massachusetts in December).

Counting my blessings and popping another tums, I am off to bed. Tomorrow we fly back to NJ. Whee!

Dave