Carmen Caramonica: “Georgia on My Mind” (n. d.)
Everything seemed to move as the eighties ended.
Jeremy had graduated from high school in 1988 and after a year in France (Rouen), started college.
The year after that, 1990, we moved across town to North Utica and a spanking new two-story town house. Here I am at night, looking through French doors out at the ravine that stretched behind us.
E., me, Ruth visiting J. at college, 1991
By then, Esther had stopped acting but she kept on singing. She tried a few accompanists who didn’t work but then found one who did in guitarist Carmen Caramonica. Carmen was a local legend, the go to man when big acts came to town and needed a guitarist as fill-in. He’d spent years on the road, including a long spell as musical director for Tony Orlando and Dawn, but had come home to Utica to live a less hectic but still productive life. He was good! They recorded a few songs in his studio with Carmen on guitar or keyboard and Esther singing –“Rainy Days and Mondays,” “But Beautiful,” Blossom Dearie’s “Hey, John.” I’ve got them as sound files on my computer but don’t know how to download them onto this blog. Thus I can’t play them for you.
I kept acting around the edges of my job. I did multiple parts in W. R. Gurney’s The Dining Room and would do again a few years later in California, that time in three-quarter round on a set so expensive that when we did the candle scene or one where we drank wine, we were under injunction not to spill wax on the glossy table top or wine on the Oriental rug that gently caressed the soles of our shoes.
I did another play by a local actor, Joe M., in which I played a messenger boy who talked with an accent like Arnold Stang but was revealed to be the Devil. When I was the Devil persona, I talked like the comic Jackie Mason. The play was a mess but it was fun to do.
Then in 1991, Esther put on a talent show at my college. She sang, I put together my Hungarian quartet for as comedy act and our friend Tom Hassler dressed up as a bumblebee and danced around the stageto Khachaturian’s “Flight of the Bumble Bee.” The emcee, a very nice Business professor who fancied himself a comic, was telling jokes between acts when I walked out dressed in a clown suit, snuck up behind him and whacked him over the head with a nerf bat.
Sadieann Spear, Esther, unidentified clown with nerf bat
ADDITIONAL LISTENING
If you don’t remember what Arnold Stang and Jackie Mason sounded like, here they are:
Arnold Stang: Chunky chocolate commercial (ca. 1955)
Jackie Mason: “On doctors” (1980s?)
MUSIC & ME 