Erica Orloff - Diary Of A Blues Goddess

He accepts that I am always late, always have a run in my pantyhose, crave Junior Mints, often have chipped nail polish and, to cap it off, lipstick on my teeth, and that I always cry, no…sob…at weddings. Something comes over me, and so I keep a tissue tucked in my cleavage just in case. I also wear waterproof mascara. Dominique is wrong. First of all, she wears mascara that runs despite my arguments for waterproof. Second, though she accuses me otherwise, I also still believe in love. I don’t know whether I cry because I think the love between two people taking to the dance floor for the first time as husband and wife is so beautiful, or because I’m not sure I believe it ever really lasts. Or because some of the greatest guys in my life prefer wearing pantyhose and mascara, just like me, and want to borrow my clothes. Or because no one’s ever asked me to marry him.

I want to get married someday. But after all I’ve seen as a wedding singer—grooms making out with maids of honor in upstairs hallways, the bride’s side ending up in a massive brawl with the groom’s side, and even a couple of no-show grooms on the big day—I picture, instead, me growing old like Nan. Still in this house surrounded by my friends and a few cats. I’ll be the Crazy Cat Woman of New Orleans. Though, with all the eccentric characters in this town, I’m sure that coveted title is already taken.

“Georgie! Decide already!…Come on! What about the red sequins?” Jack pulled me back to the immediate crisis of what I was going to wear at the wedding we should have left for twenty minutes before. He grabbed the red dress on its hanger and thrust it toward me.

“Convention-wear.” I hung it back up. “Stuffy parents of the bride do not want their wedding singer dressed in red. They prefer silver, pale blue…lavender, even.”

“Then wear the silver. The silver is fine.”

“Well, I have a slight problem with that.”

“What?”

“Guess?”

“Your fucking pantyhose.”

I nodded. “The silver’s got a thigh-high slit.” Pantyhose is the bane of my existence. They can put a man on the goddamn moon, land a probe on Mars, but they can’t make a pair of pantyhose that are runproof? If men wore pantyhose, I can assure you they’d have an entire Pentagon division devoted to finding a way to make them. I know that it’s oh-so-sexy to go without pantyhose, but I rather like my control tops. It’s the runs that kill me.

“Georgie…honest to God, we don’t have time to stop at the drugstore to buy a pair.”

“I know.” I shook my head. My hair was amassing into ringlets, thanks to the fact that I hadn’t left enough time to blow-dry it straight. My hair has a life of its own. I look white—sort of. People ask if I am Spanish or “something.” The “something” is pretty accurate. Nan’s mother was black, my father had some Cuban on his mother’s side, and my paternal grandfather was half-Cherokee. Down through the generations what I have from the maternal side of my family, besides a love of New Orleans and music, and great pride and a pretty strong stubborn streak is willful hair.

“Come on, Georgie,” Jack urged. “Just wear the silver, and we’ll worry about the pantyhose on the way.” Jack, quite possibly, knows more about pantyhose than the CEO of Hanes or L’eggs. In fact, every single member of the band has at one time or the other raced out on break to buy me a pair. And Jack and Gary have also bought me tampons in an emergency. Being in a band with four guys is like having four very tolerant brothers.

I threw the silver dress over my head, Jack zipped me, snagging my hair in the zipper and causing me to shriek in pain. After extricating my curls, and Jack pulling the snagged hair out of the zipper, I grabbed my makeup bag and the one pair of hose I did have that had a smallish run that might be stopped in its tracks by Wite-Out. Yes, clear nail polish works better, but when none is available, Wite-Out will do. It sort of glues the run to your leg. Elmer’s is a close second. I’ve even tried Crazy Glue in a pinch, though I very nearly glued my fingers to my leg.

Jack and I flew down the stairs, blowing kisses and waving to Nan as she sat on her balcony, watching us pile into Jack’s old Buick. If I have willful hair, he has a willful car. I settled into the passenger seat and started putting on my makeup, while he put the key in the ignition. We both crossed ourselves simultaneously in prayer that the car would start. It did. A testament to the power of miracles and the Patron Saint of Jack’s Car, whom we’d named Saint Mary Emmanuel of the Buick. Jack drove us out of the city of New Orleans toward the plantation where the wedding was to be held.

In the tiny little mirror on the visor, I watched my crimson lipstick smear on my chin as I applied it at the precise moment we hit a bump. I sighed. What the hell was I doing? How did I get to be a wedding singer in sequin dresses, pantyhose and cat-chewed bras? What I really want to do has nothing in common with dental conventions or weddings. Or leading a roomful of thirteen-year-old bar mitzvah boys on the make in the limbo (which inspires them to try to look up my dress). Or the macarena.

I want be a blues singer.

But I’m a prisoner of a fear so cold it wakes me up in the middle of the night—when I find myself talking to the spirit of Sadie. If you sing at a wedding, you have a captive audience. A roomful of people are probably so drunk they wouldn’t know an off-key C from an A-flat. They’re happy with disco and cheesy standards. Conventions are more of the same. People pretending to be single for the weekend grope each other in grand ballrooms. But blues and jazz enthusiasts are a breed apart. They’re obsessed with jazz, with what makes one instrumentalist a wedding-band player, and another John Coltrane. And the great ladies who have sung the blues are legends who cast a very long shadow. So I’ve been taking the easy way for a long time—so long that I sometimes tell myself I don’t mind being where I am. Singing ABBA instead of Billie Holiday.

Sometimes I think I haven’t earned the right to sing the blues. I’ve had a dozen relationships go up in flames, but I’ve never met The One. I haven’t loved a man so much I thought I would rip my own soul out for the chance to see him once again. I haven’t suffered enough.

I’m also not like Michelle Pfeiffer in The Fabulous Baker Boys, writhing around on top of the piano without being so klutzy that she rolls off the piano. Nor am I like Nicole Kidman in Moulin Rouge, hanging from a swing and inspiring a roomful of men to sigh. Yes, singing bubblegum pop is one thing, standing in a spotlight like a true chanteuse is something else entirely.

So while I bide my time, waiting to evolve into a blues goddess, waiting to get the nerve to stand in that hot light and belt out a song that speaks to other people, in the way that static electricity can send a shock through one person’s hand to another, I sing the words to every song I wish I didn’t know.

“Get Into the Groove,” by Madonna. Know it.

“My Heart Will Go On,” by Celine Dion. Know it.

“Oops! I Did It Again,” by Britney Spears (know it and particularly hate it).

“Celebration,” by Kool & the Gang. Can sing it blindfolded.

Unless, of course, it’s at the Wedding of the Year, and I get the shock of my young life.

Cammie Winthrop was to marry Dr. Robert Carrington III, the plastic surgeon who can liposuction your Heavenly Hash-enhanced thighs away, on this particular beautiful sunny day in May—with no humidity—as if her father had ordered up the weather from God himself, which he might have because if God can be bought, Roger Winthrop is buying. He is the king of New Orleans real estate, and the reception Jack and I were racing to in his Buick was to be held in the ballroom of the Winthrop family’s very own plantation. That’s another side of New Orleans for you. Plantations and Greek Revival mansions surrounded by moss-draped oaks. You feel as if any moment someone’s going to hog-tie you into a corset and a hoop skirt.