TOWN TOPICS, PRINCETON, N.J., WEDNESDAY, JuNE 24, 2020 • 14
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Celebrating Stew: Of Songs and Statues and Love That Can’t Be Measured
inally a dream worth remembering. If only I can remember it. For far too long, with rare exceptions, my dreams have been about trivial tasks and futile deliberations, like asking directions to places you don’t even want to go, and looming in the background always the same monumental obstacle that can’t be moved or toppled or made to vanish. Last night I woke up worn out but smiling, aware that I’d been toiling, climbing, slipping and almost falling, but not afraid, never for a minute. All I knew was the dream had something to do with statues. And why not, with statues being toppled here, there, and everywhere, all over the world. At the moment I’m remembering the opening scene of Chaplin’s City Lights, where a crowd of dignitaries is gathered for the unveiling of a monument to “Peace and Prosperity” composed of three figures, a seated female flanked by two male warriors, one wielding a sword. The unveiling of the Olympian tableau reveals the tramp, “the Little Fellow,” curled up asleep in the female figure’s lap. The dignitaries are not amused and shout at him, he tries to scramble to his feet but his baggy trousers get caught on the sword, which seems to hoist him, wriggling, tipping his derby, as the band plays the National Anthem. “The Statue Song” I’d been up past three the previous night when I saw an online New York Times front page photograph showing two NYPD cars in front of the equestrian statue of Theodore Roosevelt outside the Museum of Natural History. My first thought was of a New York night in the mid-sixties with an old friend that began with us throwing snowballs at the statue after sharing a pint of Old Crow. We had nothing against TR, no agenda, we were just “doing what comes naturally” because he was so monumentally there, not because he was “a symbol of colonialism and racism flanked by a Native American man and an African man.” The image of a statue in the snow enduring what statues have always had to put up with, even at the best of times, sent me to a song by Stew (born Mark Stewart), best-known for
the award-winning Broadway musical Passing Strange. In “The Statue Song,” from his third solo album, S omething D e ep er T han T he s e Changes, the statue tells us he’s tired of holding this sword, tired of standing still “looking dignified against my will,” and tired of looking at tourists with their “stupid pig-faced grins.” All he wants is “to be indoors again” with the hotel maid who once quenched his “lethal thirst” and sent him on his way. But he’s dealing with it, the fog’s his friend, the rain’s his “mistress fair,” he and the snow “see eye to eye,” and at least the wind won’t mess up his hair. The maid’s told him he’s no different from most men she’s been out with, asked him how it feels “right now,” while he dreams of being a pigeon on a rooftop in the sun, and of “reading newspapers, the left- and right-wing ones,” and of impossible movies, and of a scoop of ice cream. All through this soulful, melodically irresistible lament, the wistful refrain is “to be indoors again,” until the singing statue bows gently, gracef ully out, “Well, I had to wake up sometime from this dream of being real — they put me here exposed to the world — then expect me not to feel — so if you feel your life’s not going anywhere, please consider me, dear friend — out here in the fog with the tourists and the dogs while you’re indoors again.” Love Like That Something Deeper Than These Changes appeared in 2003, the year I began writing for Town Topics, the year we lost a beloved tuxedo cat named Dizzy (“the best cat ever”), and a month later adopted two newborn tuxedo kittens who could have been his kids. We named them after Nick and Nora Charles, the effervescent couple from the Thin Man movies played by William Powell and Myrna Loy. Nick was loveable but rarely effervescent, while Nora was a screwball comedy, a Disney cartoon, a creature feature, and a si-
lent musical all in one. Most kittens meet “love is more than real” and “love like the challenge of climbing and descending that can’t be measured any way.” At the the stairs in their own sweet way, but Nora same time, it’s clear that this is the song slid down the bannister. Nor did she sim- that above all others must have inspired ply trip kittenishly up the stairs: she took Passing Strange, the story of a middlethem in three effortless bounds. She did class black kid from LA who doesn’t fit not romp: she flew. And she danced. And any kind of racial, social, or cultural stetried to swing from the chandelier. The reotype (neither the “home boy” nor the gavottes we witnessed had to be seen to good boy) goes to Europe, and discovers be believed. When confronted by a suspect his voice, his art, his everything. obstacle or a toy mouse she would jump Discovering Stew straight up, halfway to the ceiling. Back in August 2002 when I called the Writing seven years ago on the eve of box office at the Bowery Ballroom for tickSchubert’s birthday, I pictured Nora as the ets for my son and I to see Arthur Lee and 19th-century Viennese equivalent of the Love, I asked about the act opening for him. feline I imagined at the composer’s feet “Who’s this guy Stew anyway?” I was regazing up at him the way cats do, as if he ferred to a piece in the previous Sunday’s and the world were one. New York Times. How could I have missed My wife and I shared a bed with both cats it? There was a huge three-column close-up until Nick died two years ago April. His picture of the performer in question, giving ashes and Dizzy’s are him the look of a bald, stocky black guy with buried in the backyard attitude. My first time through the paper I’d under a small monu- hurried past a headline that should have ment, a stone cat gaz- stopped me in my tracks (“Wry, Tuneful Stoing upward in that you- ries, All in 4-Minute Songs”). Since when and-the-world-are-one did bald, stocky black guys with attitude way, except that the write “wry, tuneful stories”? The article also objects in its line of claimed that Stew’s solo album, The Naked sight are t wo bird Dutch Painter, was “perhaps the finest colfeeders, drive-ins for lection of songs an American songwriter has woodpeckers, cardi- come up with this year” and compared him nals, chickadees, blue to Cole Porter, Randy Newman, Ray Davies, jays, and a certain in- and Warren Zevon. defatigable squirrel. y last sighting of Stew was at the To: ___________________________ Now Nora’s 17 and in-person presentation of Spike ailing and will be out From: _________________________ Date & Time: __________________ Lee’s filmed performance of Passthere with the other two before long. ing Strange at Princeton’s Garden Theatre Here is a proof of your ad, scheduled to run ___________________. But for now she still shares our bed, and on September 20, 2017, 97 years to the check it thoroughly andSong,” pay special to the following: day theattention Garden opened. His most recent onPlease the night I revisited “The Statue she was check keepingmark my side (Your willwarm, tell usand it’sknew okay)project is a live show and accompanying to make room, while I read the booklet album titled Notes from a Native Song, of Stew’s lyrics by the little booklight inspired by the writings of James Bald� Phone number � Fax number � Address � Expiration Date and found what I’d been looking for. The win, with Heidi Rodewald and members first song on Something Deeper is “Love of Stew’s group, The Negro Problem. That Like That Can’t Be Measured Anyway.” I didn’t even know of his 2012 album I’ll admit that being from Kansas, I may Making It is stunning evidence of how have been susceptible to a lyric that opens flagrantly underrated he is. But please, with reference to the sun and the moon no monuments — unless maybe they’re and the rain and how the singer’s domain along the lines of the late J. Seward “stretched and yawned along the astral Johnson’s statues of a man reading a newspaper and a boy eating a hamplains” from “cosmic Kansas” to L.A. As with so much of Stew’s music, the burger. —Stuart Mitchner melody and the singing and his creative partner Heidi Rodewald’s harmonies bring it all home, “the need to feel” because
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