Daryl Sherman, Night Life Mainstay, is Loving Her First Day Job
Plus! A Christmas tree that stops traffic!!
Hello everyone,
Welcome to Issue #145 of CAFÉ ANNE!
I’ve got nothing to say this week. Weird! Just a few housekeeping notes:
• Next Monday’s issue will be the last until CAFÉ ANNE returns January 13. If you’d like to run a classified ad before year-end, this is the time. Deets here.
• I am still offering a free CAFÉ ANNE mug to folks who spring for a $50 paid annual subscription. Or if that doesn’t float your boat, think of it as free subscription that comes with a $50 mug!
Meanwhile, huge hot-chocolate-is-the-new-heroin shoutouts to our newest paid subscribers Tia A., Deborah N., Vickey and Leah B. who sent a her pal a gift subscription. That’s enough $$$ for 25 hot cocoas at the Chocolate Room, which I will drink all at once!
I am very excited for this week’s issue, of course. We’ve got a look at Brooklyn’s very cool traffic cone Xmas tree and a visit with Daryl Sherman, my favorite Midtown office building jazz pianist. Please enjoy.
Regards!
Anne
THE PITCH SHOW
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TRAFFIC CONE CORNER
A Christmas Tree That Stops Traffic!
One of the great things about NYC this time of year is the giant Christmas trees blocking your path everywhere you go. While the Rocka Socka Center tree grabs most of the attention, just about every neighborhood and venue has it’s own bedazzled conifer. There’s trees for the New York Stock Exchange, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and, of course, the Empire Outlets Mall in Staten Island. If you’re really hard up for free hot cocoa, you could visit a different lighting ceremony every night of the week.
But my favorite is the tree erected by the DUMBO Improvement District under the Manhattan Bridge. Yes, the 10-foot tree, bedecked with string lights and a big transparent star, is made from 162 traffic cones—a nod to the area’s perpetual status as a construction zone.
It’s a fantastic thing, right? I especially love it because while I’m very pro Christmas tree, I have a real thing for traffic cones.
They look like brave little people, proudly doing their jobs, and feeling very special: “Look how bright and orange I am! There is no one more orange than me!” I don’t tell them that there are more than a hundred million identical cones around the globe.
If you can’t make the trip to DUMBO to see this tree, you can make one yourself. Yes, TrafficCones.com (“We’ll Get Your Cones to You Quickly and On Time”) is an actual web site.
Merry Cone-mas!
PROFILE
Daryl Sherman, Nightlife Mainstay, is Loving Her First Day Job
Daryl Sherman plays cocktail piano every weekday afternoon in the atrium of a big office building in Midtown Manhattan. Last Tuesday, I arrived early for our interview so I could survey the scene and watch her perform.
The jazz pianist and singer, who has been performing in NYC for 50 years, was seated at grand piano next to the two-story Christmas tree. She was facing, as usual, the public restrooms and a bank of elevators.
She doesn't sing much in the atrium because her voice would get lost in the vast hall, but the sparkling notes of "Over the Rainbow" and "New York State of Mind" rang through the space, lending the corporate scene a delightful cocktail vibe.
Around the perimeter of the atrium, which is open to the public, delivery guys gobbled their lunches. Silver-haired businessmen in cashmere polo sweaters discussed sales figures. A homeless man dozed in a chair. A lady in a headscarf bent over a table of newspaper and magazine clippings she'd covered with scribbles, arranging and rearranging them as if they were a giant jigsaw puzzle.
Ms. Sherman played on: "Jingle Bell Rock," and the Peanuts Theme Song.
A hunch-backed oldster paced back-and-forth in front of the piano, staring at the floor. A toddler scampered by and waved.
Suddenly, Ms. Sherman let loose with a loud cackle—a laugh that rang through the atrium.
I ran over. "What are you laughing at?" I asked.
She stopped playing to explain. "This place!" she said. "It's fun!"
When her shift ended, Ms. Sherman suggested we retire to Chartwell Booksellers, a store in the lobby dedicated mainly to books by and about Winston Churchill. The store's owner, who oversees the atrium's music program, asked her to take the piano gig three years ago.
"I tell everybody I get a kick out of this—this my first day job!" Ms. Sherman told me as we walked over. "I have a day job in a building. Respectable, like most of the world!"
The owner was out, but the store's clerk let us cozy up on the carpet in the back of the store. I told Daryl I’d brushed up on her long career by reading her website.
"It's not updated very well, but you get an idea," she said. "I mean, my past is better than my present. Well, I shouldn't say that. It's not better, but probably more impressive. All the places I played! How did I do that?"
I was more curious to hear what it's like to play cocktail piano in the public lobby of a giant Manhattan office building.
"The place tells its own story," she said. "You observe a lot."
While she plays, she cranes her neck to see what the office workers brought in for lunch. "I like to watch people eat. Is that odd?" she said. "It's just interesting!”
I asked about the lady with the newspaper clippings. She comes in every single day, Ms. Sherman said, and is always working on the collage.
Everyone has a story. "If you talk to her, she gets very defensive and angry and she says her father—or sometimes her grandfather—owned this building and was murdered up here," said Ms. Sherman of one regular. "She thinks big!"
Another lobby regular was quiet for months until he started requesting Irvin Berlin tunes. When they got friendly, Ms. Sherman brought him homemade kugel for Passover and later asked how he liked it. "It was okay," he told her. "I'm used to it sweet."
"You can't do anything right for him," she said.
One fellow came to the atrium every day just to use the men's room. He and Ms. Sherman started smiling and waving to each other when he waited in line, though they never spoke. He turned out to be the manager of a nearby deli, and now Ms. Sherman gets free coffee whenever she stops in.
While she's likely played thousands of solo shows over the past five decades, she doesn't mind that her job at the atrium is simply to add a little color and cheer to the scene. "I'm not trying to make anybody listen to me, because they have their agenda," she said. "It's fine, you know, l have mine."
Sometimes people want a turn playing the piano. The answer is no. She's happy when folks take photos or request a tune. A lot of the requests come from the building's security staff—they like Louis Armstrong and Frank Sinatra.
"Do men ever ask you out?" I wondered.
"Nobody asks me out, nobody!" she said. "No one's even asked me out for lunch! I never thought about it. Now I'm going to go home and be miserable."
"But you know what," she continued, "we do have regulars who pass through. And one, we call him the banana man, because he comes through, and our collage artist—he gives her one and he always puts one on the piano for me. I don't really like bananas that much. So when he leaves, I give her mine."
"I love that you get a banana every day," I said.
"But he's never asked me out!” said Ms. Sherman. “I don't care, because I love my own company. I make myself really laugh. I have a good life and I have an American Express card and I can do anything I want."
"But I had my day," she added.
Ms. Sherman grew up in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, a small Catholic mill town. Her father Sammy worked in the family business, Sherman's Restaurant, but played jazz trombone in the local clubs on weekends. "He would take off his apron and put on his tuxedo," she said.
Ms. Sherman sometimes sang in her father's band. After college, she worked for a short spell as a music teacher, but got bored. In 1974, when she was 25, she packed up her Fender Rhodes and moved to Manhattan. She rented a studio apartment on East 49th Street for $260 a month and has lived there ever since.
Unlike many NYC musicians who have to take office jobs or teach lessons to support themselves, she was always able to earn a living performing at venues like Jilly's and Jimmy Weston's. She lived out her father's dream, she said. And golly, did she have fun: "The groupies!”
"The first few years, there was a character, his name was Chief, Cheifee," she said. "His real name was Jack Kleinman or something like that. I was working at a place called the Camelot, doing a solo thing. And he was there every night. He was, as he said, a turf accountant. A bookie."
"A turf accountant?" I asked.
"Turf! Like racetrack!" said Ms. Sherman. "He was little guy, big cigar. He took a shine to me. And eventually he started asking me out just for company. It was nothing to me, but he was such a character, and he was my groupie. And because he was a bookie, he wasn't rich, but he had all these connections. 'What do you need? 'I need a television.' They were like, stolen. I got a television."
"Another of his clients was a theater scalper who owed him money," she said. "All of my friends and my family, he always got us front row seats. We didn't pay for the theater. I miss him so much."
An hour had passed. We had to leave the bookstore, so we returned to the atrium and grabbed a table, where Ms. Sherman continued reminiscing.
Her favorite decade was the 80s, when she played the big Midtown hotel bars, including a 14-year stint at the Waldorf Astoria. The economy was booming, the hotels were full, and musicians were earning union wages and pensions.
"Cheifie was dead by that time, but a bunch of engineers who were working for years on Rockefeller Center and staying at the Sheridan took me out to lots of places I couldn't afford," she said. "It was very heady.”
She remembers, in particular, the piano bar at the Midtown Sheridan. "That was also the era of lots of hookers in the 80s," she said. "Everybody was in business. They would come in and tell me what to play while they were, you know, 'I'm finishing him off, so play such-and-such!'"
Now that Ms. Sherman is "1000 years old," as she puts it, people give her their seat on the bus, which used to annoy her, but she now appreciates. Her back is killing her. She spends hours getting ready in the morning at home, only to arrive at the atrium, glance in the mirror and say, "Three hours to look this bad?"
"This has happened," laughed Ms. Sherman (who is lovely, if you ask me). "But then, not too many people get that close."
She considers her current life very glamorous, and not just because she still travels several times a year to perform in London and Tokyo. She can't seem to get over the fact that she's playing an office building in New York City.
"This is a glamorous building," she said, taking in the lobby, with its green marble, Starbucks counter and water wall. "I'm on bloody Park Avenue. I look up every day, I look up at these buildings, and I still say, 'I can't believe I'm here.'"
There was more I wanted to ask Ms. Sherman, but she suddenly turned the tables to interview me. This happens occasionally, but I've never had a subject grill me the way Ms. Sherman worked me over.
Where did I grew up? Where did I go to school? Ms. Sherman wanted to know all about my career and how I started the newsletter. Where do I live? How was I paying the bills? Did I ever write fiction? Was I seeing anybody?
Then she signaled time was up—she had to get home to call Tokyo. I didn't have a chance to learn much more about her adventures.
"I don't know why you're doing this, but thank you," she said, as we parted.
"Oh," I told her, "It's been a delight. I started the newsletter so I could write about people like you."
She considered this for a moment. "Well," she said finally, "I guess there might be worse things."
PS Ms. Sherman doesn’t usually sing in the atrium, but when I requested a Christmas song, she sang a little tune just for us.
CAFÉ ANNE is published every Monday by Brooklyn journalist Anne Kadet. If you’re enjoying the newsletter, please consider supporting it with a paid subscription ($5 a month or $50 a year). I’ll send you a surprise in the mail!
That’s such a lovely and interesting profile. She’s happy. It comes through. Someone take this amazing lady to lunch!!!
She seems like a quintessential New Yorker, someone from a Maira Kalman book. I think it’s so great that an office building will still pay an actual human to play music in the lobby.
And you know I love that cone tree!