Last night I went with my parents and our friend Tolly to New York to see the Bach B-minor Mass at St. Bartholemew’s. We had a riotous time, starting with a lengthy meal at a restaurant in the Waldorf-Astoria hotel (we’re some posh mofos, we are) named Oscar’s.
Our waitress there was named Imolina, and had been working there for 37 years, after arriving from Puerto Rico at age 16. She was totally righteous, taking all of our bizarre requests in stride. The food was particularly good, although like most gourmet establishments, the portions were annoyingly small, and the prices were exorbitant. I think the meal for four came to $160, not including tip, and we didn’t even have that much to drink (although I did have a Tiramisu Martini, which is as good as it sounds, and a reasonably value even at $9).
After scooting out of there, we headed to the church (which was handily adjacent) and sat down to enjoy the show. The performance was good; I won’t bore you with the details. More noteworthy was the behavior of the individuals around us.
I’m sure you’ve noticed that some of the elderly population can be difficult to take, particularly in a public setting of some kind; I’m here (among other reasons) to inform you that the old folks of Manhattan are beyond comparison to whatever geriatrics you may have lying around in your home town. To be fair, some of these folks weren’t technically OLD, but were of what might be termed “advanced middle age,” but they were annoying none the less.
In front of me, slightly to the left, I had the “informative” gentleman who was intensely interested in every possible conversation near him. If you entered a discussion in which he felt he had some kind of useful anecdote or opinion, he felt obliged to share it with you, in a low mumbly voice that was all but incomprehensible. During the performance, he was kind enough to stop mumbling (mostly), but he kept glancing around with a strange look in his eyes that I can only describe as “I wonder how many savagely gored bodies I could store in the nave.” Not crazed; just gauging.
To our right, we had a strange middle-aged fellow who, I assume, knew the people behind us, because he kept trying to get them to pass down some things he had left in a pew. It turned out the items were in OUR pew, and we had sat next to them while he wandered off somewhere, and he didn’t want to squeeze by us, he just wanted to sit on the end of the row. Rather than asking US to pass the things down, though, he kept asking the people behind us, who didn’t have the foggiest idea what he was talking about, and so he became more and more vehement about his items, until finally WE realized what was going on and passed them down to him. He then spent the entirety of the performance leafing loudly through a copy of the score he had brought along.
The couple behind us was extremely decrepit, and probably not long for this world. They also seemed prone to periodic outbursts of sneezes, snorts, hacks, coughs, and soft, sad moans. We’re hoping they just had pneumonia, as opposed to tuberculosis, because I don’t particularly feel the need to move to Arizona for the dry air and then spend 25 years wandering aimlessly from silver-mine town to cowtown, gambling for my living and shooting cardsharps with a pearl-handled sixgun.
The real big winner, however, was the gentleman in the row in front, slightly to the right, who arrived a few minutes before the performance was scheduled to begin, dropped a massive rucksack on the pew next to him (I swore he was going to set up camp and start cooking s’mores over a fire), and began asking loudly of everyone near him if they’d come to the lecture the previous evening. Apparently Peter Schickele (“biographer” of P.D.Q. Bach) had given a lecture on Monday that he’d been unable to make, so he wanted the full details of what it was all about. Most annoyingly, he sounded like a cross between Carson Kressley and Barbara Streisand. He was about 100 pounds overweight and apparently thought it was appropriate to come to musical performances in churches in a sweaty tshirt and ripped jeans.
After finally finding someone who had apparently almost made the lecture (the body-hiding old fellow in front of us), they discussed this at length, and at volume, until the performance began. Mr. Streisley then managed to remain relatively unobtrusive until the second half, when at the end of the creed he apparently had an orgasm and almost broke the pew. Then apparently he needed to go clean himself up, for during the Sanctus he got up and wandered off somewhere, we assumed to the bathroom, and then returned during the Benedictus and sat down, HARD, on the pew.
I guess he doesn’t have a lot of interest in the last few movements of the mass, because in stark contrast to his pseudosexual response to “Et Vitam,” he started getting out all his subway maps and shuffling them around, planning his route back to Castro or Queens or wherever the hell he dragged himself.
It’s entirely possible that he simply went down into a subway station and assembled a pup tent, but we didn’t follow him to find out. We skeedaddled back to the car, and then forged our way down to the Lincoln Tunnel (the amount of people and cars on the streets in New York at 10pm is baffling to me) and made it back to Wilmington by around 12:45. I, of course, didn’t make it to bed until 1:30, since I had to purchase gas (and nearly got shot in the process, I think) and put a large washing machine outside by the curb. Still, the day was a resounding success, if only because I think I might have managed to get a picture of the hair of a woman three rows in front of us; it appeared that she had painstakingly ironed it straight, and then styled the crown of her head with a dremel tool. It was amazing. I dreamt about it all night.
