Every year my Pink Palace housemates and I scatter across the globe for our various New Years adventures, and miss the opportunity to welcome the new year together. We now have a tradition of gathering in late January to re-celebrate with an event we call “Re-New Years”. We get dressed up in our finest, stroll out to fancy hotel bars, and do countdowns from twelve to negative two before shouting, “Happy New Years!” and then heading to the next place to repeat the ceremony.
This year Delia insisted that we all add hats to the usual snappy attire. This resulted in a variety of interpretations, including vintage hats and beautiful peacock-like plumage formed from a pasty. I thought we all looked pretty sharp, although not that unusual, but as we strode into the Driscol necks were snapping all around us. We gathered around the piano and within minutes a security guard with a cable dangling from his ear appeared as if by magic, suddenly standing stiffly and silently beside us as though trying to blend in with the wooden post behind him. We were quick to order a round of vintage cocktails, if nothing else to assure them that we were just common folks here to, at a minimum, finance the repairs of any potential shenanigans with our purchases.
At the piano an ancient but lively and brightly adorned woman returned to running her fingers up and down the keys, swinging piano hammers into the old metal strings with great enthusiasm. As the jazz bounced and tapped its way back into the room, just as in any old cowboy film, the patrons slowly turned their heads back to their conversations and the general mumbling ambiance rose up to join the musical background.
Damien Di Fede quickly set about taking photographs of cocktail glasses at odd angles, squinting into his tiny camera from below the piano. As the minutes passed without our having done anything more spectacularly dangerous, people began approaching us to ask what this, “was all about”. We were happy to tell them about Re-New Years and people really loved the idea. I’m always a little surprised when people still find my friends’ antics unusual in this town, but it would be even more surprising to me if we weren’t always then met with friendly, curious inquiry. There’s a folksy friendliness that’s one of the best parts of the Texas side of Austin, even among the most hardened of republicans.
Always one to mix with the help, it didn’t take long before I was chatting up the feisty old woman at the piano and she was daring me to come up with a song challenge. “Anything from 1940 on, I can do it.” I started out easy with Misty and then convinced her to tear it up on Take the A Train, just to give her jazz improv spirit some room to move. In between she poured out stories. She told me about how that particular song was written by two guys on opposite coasts (Billy Strayhorn and Duke Ellington) over the telephone. She told me about a time when she was playing a gig and a nice young man walked up, said he loved her playing, and asked if he could sit in on drums. She was skeptical at first, and from the moment they started they were in perfect sync. He was following her every move and tempo change and the chemistry was amazing. They played for several hours until finally she turned and pointed at him and said, “OK, that’s it, who are you?!” He laughed and turned out to be one of Duke Ellington’s drummers.
The pianists name was Patricia Griffin and she had along with her a slightly younger friend who’d brought her a present and was sitting beside the piano for the gig. At one point this friend was putting on a coat and leaving and I said goodbye, but when I turned back she was back at her seat. “I thought you were leaving,” I said, “not that I wanted to see you go.” “Oh,” she said, “Patricia convinced me to stay. Said she should walk me to my car.” Patricia assured me that it wasn’t safe for a woman to be walking to her car alone after dark. She convinced her friend to wait until the gig was over.
A little while later someone came over with a walker. This enthusiastic chaperone, while plenty willing and able to tear it up at the piano for hours, could hardly stand up! I laughed to myself. Who, exactly, was waiting to walk whom safely home? I silently promised to be even half as cool as Patricia when I got to her age.
Soon enough I’d spun enough women through swing dancing moves and we’d gathered plenty of artsy photographs of cocktail glasses. We declared it time and all loudly called out the countdown to negative two. We hugged and cheered and replaced the words to Auld Lang Syne with the traditional, much more memorable, and much more fun, “Matt Shaw”. Singing, “Matt Shaw Matt Shaw Matt Shaw Matt Shaw, Matt Shaw Matt Shaw Matt Shaaaaaaaaawwww…” we gathered our coats and headed off to the Stephen F. Austin, pausing only briefly at the door to extract Leo Evette as his stunning good looks and simple, “hello” almost picked up a girl on the way out.
