"Do you want the polish that attracts love?" asked Christine Lavin, as she painted the nails of her fans with silver glitter in the lobby of the Sanders Theatre Saturday evening. Lavin, a beloved folk singer, is far from an ordinary performer.
In fact, you've probably never seen anyone put on a show like her. Her stage routine, which includes an acoustic guitar, a phase sampler (a device that lets her create impressive harmonies and technical effects with her voice), and a running comic routine, keeps you entertained from start to finish. She's loony, sarcastic, and silly. She's been called the woman who can write a song about anything. In short, she's a talent to be reckoned with.
At first glance, you would never know that Lavin is such a powerhouse performer. Dressed in a black shirt and black pants, she stepped onto the stage with her guitar and immediately engaged the audience in her music. Her first piece was the fun-loving "What Was I Thinking?" in which she addresses the issues of buying the wrong dress for a big event, getting a horrible haircut ("I look in the mirror, Art Garfunkel is looking at me"), and the complete idiocy of the woman who invented the now-famous Florida butterfly ballot. At the end of the song, she snuck in a snide comment about the recent controversial election.
"We've just witnessed the first bloodless coup in America," she said to the cheering, apparently liberal audience.
Next she asked, "Have you ever fallen in love with someone you had absolutely nothing in common with?" One woman shouted out that she was currently in love with such a person. Lavin then grilled the woman about what her lover was doing at the moment. The woman promptly and rather proudly replied that he was racing cars somewhere.
"I'm sure you're sad that you're not out there with him now," said Lavin.
She broke into her next song, "Good Thing He Can't Read My Mind," to illustrate her point. In this piece, she pointed out the irony of how people do things they hate for the people they love, such as going to the opera, eating sushi, and skydiving.
After a few rollicking numbers, Lavin ventured into some more serious music. She sang a touching song by Angela Kaset called, "Something in Red." Even though Lavin's small-but-sweet voice is more suited to her funnier ballads, she managed to pull off this sad and wonderful number with a great deal of poise and lyricism.
Another piece she sang she called "a work in progress," a song that was inspired by a visit to a museum in Dallas, Texas. "I found the museum in the most unlikely of places. I wrote this song with a souvenir pen from there," she told the audience. This bittersweet number dealt with such difficult issues as the murder of John F. Kennedy and other tragedies. She used her phase sampler to make haunting echo effects of such lines as "Our lives just go on and on. We are the lucky ones." This serious song was beautiful and mesmerizing in its honesty and sincerity.
The highlight of the evening was without a doubt the witty piece, "You Look Pretty Good For Your Age." Lavin ventured into the crowd with a "spelunking lamp" on her head. "This is my version of the lighthouse," she said, bobbing her head up and down.
Her goal was to find "Mr. Charismatic Cambridge." She searched the audience for the most eligible male for the role. Lavin wandered around the auditorium, flashing her light on various men - both young and old - and embarrassing them to the delight of the women in the crowd. She finally settled on an elderly man and gave him the coveted "Mr. Charismatic Cambridge" crown, which was cut out from the pages of a newspaper. Sporting the newsprint crown on his head, the man seemed quite pleased with himself.
Lavin also discussed her experiences living on Manhattan's upper west side. She sang a song about her gay neighbor Ray, who ran a copy shop on 72nd and Broadway. Ray was obsessed with Broadway star Linda Eder - so much that he decorated his shop with pictures of her and played her music all day. When Eder eventually left the Broadway scene to pursue motherhood, Ray was heartbroken. Lavin told the crowd that he fell into a deep depression and died of a caffeine overdose from a Mocha Java he purchased at the local Starbucks.
"Just kidding," she said. "Boy, you should have seen the looks on your faces!"
Lavin then launched into the real ending of the song, in which Ray managed to find another Broadway star to become obsessed with: the blonde in the yellow dress from Contact. Ray, though impressed with the song, asked Lavin to remind her audiences that he hadn't forgotten Eder: "Tell them that when I dream at night, I see Linda in a yellow dress."
For her encore, she recited a poem called "The Polka Dancing Bus Driver And The 40-Year-Old Mystery." She told the audience that when she was traveling, she had met an airport express bus driver who played polka music in his bus all the time. "I knew there had to be a story behind it."
The one disappointment of the evening was that Lavin did not sing the clever title song of her new CD, "Getting In Touch With My Inner Bitch." However, from start to finish, the quirky Lavin was an absolute delight on stage. The crowd did not want to see her leave, and it seemed as if she played for too short a time. Her songs were so real and heartfelt that it was difficult not to love her.
After Lavin's heartwarming performance, Cheryl Wheeler faced the difficulty of living up to the crowd's expectations. However, she quickly proved herself more than up to the challenge. Like Lavin, Wheeler's unassuming was conveyed through her choice of attire: loose khakis and a purple shirt. The talented pianist Kenny White served as a backup singer to the weathered-but-brilliant folk songstress.
"I spend a lot of time on the road listening to the radio," she told the audience. "I'm in the car most of my life, and occasionally I hop out to sing," she said. Like Lavin, she managed to get in another dig at President Bush: "I stopped listening to the radio because I can't stand to hear his name spoken."
Wheeler is an up-front and honest performer that makes witty and insightful comments throughout her performances. "This is a song I should not have written, and I know that," she told the audience at one point. "But no one's telling me what to do, including me," she said.
Her set dealt with such eclectic topics as Hurricane Floyd and her encounter with a hotel desk clerk in a hotel in Grand Marais, MN. Her voice was a rich, deep alto, and filled with surprising nuances. She sank into the lower register of her voice with ease, conveying a warm, heartfelt tone.
Wheeler had no trouble entertaining the audience, which laughed at her every joke. Her sense of humor was evident in many of her songs, such as the intriguing "Musta Been." Her skills as a poet shone through in this song with its haunting and introspective lyrics: "I must have been Ghandi, or Buddha, or someone like that/I must've brought rest to the restless, fed the hungry too, I must've have something great to get to have you."
After she sang the song, she did a spoof on her own piece, changing the lyrics: "I must have been Hitler, or Satan, or someone like that/ I must've brought torts to the tortured, drowned some puppies too/I must've done something bad to have to have you."
Wheeler ended the concert "with two of the most ridiculous songs [she'd] ever written." The first piece she sang was "Potato." Before the first chord, she explained to the audience that "sometimes the song god just puts a song in your head and you don't have the option of not singing it." She then burst into a ridiculous rendition of the "Mexican Hat Dance," trying to make the syllable "to" of the word potato end phonetically on the chorus. The lyrics to the song are ingenious, with lines such as "They have eyes but they do not have faces/I don't know if their feelings get hurt/By just hanging around in dark places, where they can only stare at the dirt."
She closed her set with "the absolute worst song [she] ever wrote." This song, entitled "I'm Gonna Poop In A Handy House," put the audience in hysterics before she left the stage.
The cheering crowd waited for Wheeler and Lavin to return to the stage for a side-by-side encore. "I hope we waited long enough," Wheeler said. "The next song I'm going to sing is called 'I'm Going to Pee In The Living Room,'" she said, laughing. Wheeler then broke into the piece "Howl at the Moon," a beautiful, quirky number about what she would do if she were a dog.
Besides doing some backup singing, for Wheeler, Lavin showed off her talents as glow in the dark baton-twirler. It was a fitting end to a rather offbeat but deliciously fun evening.
