for ClassicalTV.com

The nearly breathless phone was from my High School friend Jerry Blatt, Bette Midler’s manager. Nina Simone was in town and would be playing one night only at the Village Vanguard. It was by invitation only and I should tell Art D’Lugoff or whoever was at the door that I was with Bette. Simone, that great singer/pianist/composer, had been battling the I.R.S. and had fled to the Caribbean in 1973 and then taken up residence in France. This trip to New York and the one night concert was totally hush-hush.

The Vanguard was packed and excitement filled the air. Looking only a bit older then when I’d last seen her at the Newport Jazz Festival, almost twenty years before, Simone entered the room, dressed head to toe like an African priestess. “Hello friends,” she said. She was alone, without her famous band. She sat at the piano which had defined her life from when she’d been a child prodigy in North Carolina through her years as a classical pianist at the Julliard School to today. In the midst of one of her jazz/soul concerts Simone was known to toss off a perfect minute-long Bach Gigue or Debussy Etude. But then when Nina Simone was on stage, it wasn’t just a concert, it was a happening, a visitation, a revelation, a political lesson, and a communion. This night would be no different.

She began her concert with standards: "Someone to Watch over Me," "My Baby Just Cares for Me," and “My Funny Valentine,” mentioning other Jazz musicians. Then she stopped, as though receiving a communication from Beyond, and began caressing the piano keys in what I knew was the intro to her cover of “Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair.” Except tonight the opening word was extended, riffed on, scatted, moaned, and suffered through for maybe four minutes. By the time she had reached the second word, I’ll bet everyone in the club understood what it meant to be a person of color in America.

Simone didn’t even wait for applause but sailed into "Little Girl Blue" then “Mississippi Goddam”, and “Four Women.” Ending that set with her trenchant :"I Wish I Knew How it Would Feel to be Free." It had been an extraordinary journey into her and our heart of darkness. Then she was gone.

from 50 Books Every Gay Person should Read

In a way, it comes back to those famous photos of the author: the deep-set eyes appearing bruised, as though from seeing far too much for his sensitivity, the complexion that even in black and white looks sallow, yellow, unhealthy to the touch. What nowadays is referred to by Fashionistas as “Heroin-Chic.” My first thought was “God, what a degenerate!” Then I read a bit about his life and realized he was increasingly ill as he aged with worsening asthma that couldn’t be controlled as anyone can today with an over-the-counter inhaler. No, Proust had to lie in bed, unmoving, for hours, in a cork-lined room, as dust and noise and soot and allergy-proofed as money could make it.

I first read Swann’s Way in the summer of my 17^th year. I would take that fat Modern Library edition of the Scott-Moncrieff translation with me everywhere that Manhattan summer. I was attending Queens College, City University of New York, a free school not then under open admissions, with a tight student body of 4500 and we had to sustain a B-average and pass a “Comprehensive Examination” to move into sophomore year. Proust, Tolstoy’s stories, and Melville’s novellas were on my summer reading list.

 It took me about ten tries to get into the “Overture” which I finally accomplished on a sizzling August afternoon, shaded by trees at the south end of the lake at Central Park, and only once I felt utterly debilitated and gave in to Proust’s endless sentences. But once “inside” the book, I didn’t look back. Swann’s Way was rejected by all publishers and so printed by Grasset at the author’s cost. Declining it, Andre Gide commented “Too many Duchesses!” Yet, if Proust had never written anything else, he would have made it into the pantheon of great writers.

Five years later I came upon the two-volume Random House set of Remembrance of Things Past in Strand Books and I read volume two– translating the French directly –In the Shadow of Girls in Flower. It’s a painterly book, impressionistic, almost purposely non-dramatic, with characters –-Marcel’s grandmother, Bloch, Elstir, Vinteuil, Morel, Albertine. –- receiving a few new brushstrokes every time we meet them. Marcel’s descriptions of his hotel room at sunset, while he’s supposed to be napping at the seashore in Balbec, vary slightly daily, reminding me of all those Monet haystack paintings, one bluer, one more violet, one almost orange, etc.