Ava Fodor, a slightly plump, frizzy-haired nineteen-year-old American au pair in Paris struggles with being less than perfect. Jean-Michel is Ava's fussy, exacting first French boyfriend whose provincialism drives her up the wall yet who educates he...
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"Hey, could you do me a favor and play happy birthday for my friend over there when they bring out the cake?"
Groan. My job as the house singer/pianist at The Blue Willow, an upscale restaurant with a downtown clientele in Greenwich Village, would soon be over. That was fine by me. The only thing I found more annoying than being asked to play happy birthday at least twice a week, was being requested to play Piano Man by customers who would then tip me an entire dollar. The waiters at the restaurant made ten times the tips I made every night, and my base salary wasn't much higher than theirs.
"Uh – after we do the happy birthday thing could you play Piano Man? It's one of his favorite songs."
Too fed up to speak, I nodded as the young guy with the outer-boroughs accent slipped two dollar bills into my tip jar. I wrapped up the super-cerebral, intricate improvisation I'd been doing on the chord progressions for Song for My Father which no one recognized or cared about, and launched into Happy Birthday as the waiter came out of the kitchen with the lit-up birthday cake.
Until I'd gotten this job, I'd had no idea how banal it could be to earn a steady income as a house musician. It was right up there with playing in a wedding band or doing a hotel lounge gig. Top requirements for the job had nothing to do with talent or creativity. It was all about 1) starting on time, 2) playing customers' requests, and 3) not singing or playing too loudly so people could hear themselves talk.
The pendulum of my ongoing internal debate over whether I was meant to be a musician or writer had swung wildly back into the musician corner after slogging through four years of paper and senior-essay writing at Yale. One thing was for sure, I was my parents' child after all. I had picked up the impractical career aspirations gene from both of them. I thought by working as a professional musician, I'd been thumbing my nose at my Yale friends down on Wall St. working one hundred-hour weeks as investment banking associates. Contemplating my tip jar with the two dollar bills in it, I wasn't so sure any more.
As I launched into Piano Man, I was heartened by the thought that it would all be over soon. Milton Fine, my boss and a well-known Manhattan slum lord, had gotten his comeuppance from city authorities in their latest clampdown and lost his liquor license. I had until the end of June to figure out what to do with the rest of my life.
Finding another steady gig as a house musician in the heart of Greenwich Village would be next to impossible. No musician I knew had a steady performing job in Manhattan outside of a hotel lounge. I knew what that was all about, too. I'd done a gig at Novotel near Times Square the year before – another soul-deadening experience that had paid the rent for six months. Tired of being ignored by tourists in transit in the hotel lounge, I'd auditioned for a gig at the cocktail lounge of the Gramercy Park Hotel, farther downtown and known as a celebrity hangout, where many well-known bands stayed when on tour in Manhattan. I'd been thrilled when they offered me a two-night a week spot.
