My Birthday With Cole Porter, Other More Troubling World Matters

by Phyllis Chesler
Pajamas Media
October 2, 2009

http://www.phyllis-chesler.com/626/my-birthday-with-cole-porter-other-more-troubling

Excerpt:

Yesterday was my birthday and I celebrated it in high, old Manhattan style. My family and I trooped down to the Oak Room at the mightily spiffed-up Algonquin Hotel—yes, the long-ago haunt of beloved, literary drunks—and we listened to Cole Porter as interpreted by the very elegant and exceedingly tall Karen Akers. It was an expensive but classy evening.

I looked around and saw many wheelchairs, canes, and walkers. Clearly, nostalgia for lost youth and for the mood evoked by a Porter song had turned these people out on a weekday night. Their faces beamed, their eyes were dreamy. Porter was certainly before my time but I loved the movie about his life in which Kevin Kline brilliantly starred. And, once, long ago, when I was a singer, a chanteuse, a cabaret performer, ('tis true, I've had many lives), I sang Porter songs too. I still love them.

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