One Small Thing: Susie Boyt

I went into lockdown, fists clenched, eyes down. I’ll give this family a lockdown to remember, I thought. I made a feast every night to encourage togetherness. I hoovered the cornices, while saving the spiders’ lives. I lectured the roses about their personal growth. I starched and ironed the frills on my daughters’ pillowcases. I scrubbed the kitchen floor on my hands and knees twice a week. I telephoned the lonely and sent gifts to the sad at heart. I work from home anyway, but I had frequent new challenges:

‘Mum, I need a poem in the style of Carol Ann Duffy in the voice of Melania Trump.’

‘Coming up.’

Praise is important to me.

I tried to finish my novel furiously and no book deserves to be written in that vein. I took on a few extra jobs in the community, speaking to the bereaved at length, several times a week. (I’ve had training to do this work.) I like helping people but it was hard to get my boundaries straight. At one point a woman I barely know who was ‘being careful’ asked me if I would go to Homebase for her to get some topsoil as she had some seedlings she fancied planting out.

OK.

My friends are as vital to my happiness as my family and I missed them all terribly. I felt like Cinderella with my pockets full of Dettol wipes. I pined for Piccadilly. I missed that sore feeling in your palm bones that comes from clapping too hard as the actors bow. I missed the soft unfurling of a napkin onto my knee. I wanted to be in a piano bar with a cocktail in a dress with a silk satin lining (and crisps).

Then I got ill - it wasn’t IT - I think it was just trying to do everything I normally do and ace the housework and raise the spirits of the community with almost all the treats I rely on removed. I was delighted with my slight temperature and my Dickensian pallor. Three days in bed. What luxury.

Then one night I discovered Billy’s Place, a weekly one man cabaret show from the sitting room of Billy Stritch’s Manhattan apartment. I had had the pleasure of seeing Stritch, a charming and well known American composer, vocalist, and jazz pianist , last autumn at the Bemelmans Bar at the Carlyle Hotel in New York, my favourite place in the world

Susie: I love it here so much, I think it’s where I want to die.

Waiter: Not tonight please Madam.
.

These shows are broadcast live from New York on Thursday nights via Billy Stritch’s facebook page. Anyone can join for free. I listened with a Lemsip and love in my heart. It was as though Cole Porter and Rogers and Hart and the Gershwins and Irving Berlin had all come down to save me.

Sitting at his grand piano with a different cocktail every week, Stritch’s intelligent interpretations and his warmth and kindness have lifted my heart enormously. It’s the noble art of entertainment through and through. One week he sang ‘It Never Was You’ a beautiful Kurt Weil melody about a lost love that cannot be matched, with so much feeling and understanding that I cried and cried. In the song, the narrator is at pains to explain he has had a satisfactory existence; ‘I’ve seen a wide variety/Of interesting things’ and yet the lack of a specific much-missed loved-one has been the primary focus of his entire life. It is one of those songs that makes you feel almost unbearable longing for things you couldn’t even name. It knocks you out in the best possible way. The morning after, I sang it to my mother at the cemetery on her anniversary and over and over on the two mile walk home. I miss her so much and the song seemed to know it.

8000 people watched Billy’s Place last week (episode 5) , more than three times the number that can fit into Carnegie Hall, where Stritch has often performed. During the show messages of support fly in from the great and the good of show business. You can even make requests and fix yourself the same cocktail that Stritch has, for maximum kinship. (Last week it was an Old Fashioned.)

‘I love doing this and I also love having a roof over my head,’ Stritch says, modestly requesting paypal donations to his ‘tip jar’ at the end of each show.

And why not?

I hope it will go on forever.

Eve, a nervous young actress from a powerful theatrical dynasty, has found herself married to an international expert on anxiety called Jim. Could it work? Should it work? Must the show always go on? This is a highly-strung comedy about love, fame, grief, showbusiness and the depths of the gutter press. Its witty and sincere tone - familiar to fans of Susie's newspaper column - will delight and unnerve in equal measure.

Susie Boyt’s latest novel is Love & Fame (Virago). It is available from Amazon, Waterstones and independent bookstores via Hive.

“She writes with such precision and wisdom about the human heart under duress” SUNDAY TIMES

Virago recently published a tenth anniversary edition of Susie’s memoir
My Judy Garland Life with a new preface.

The book defies definition . . . it is a bold experiment that sets out to map the boundaries of celebrity obsession, and somewhere along the way discovers what it means to be human . . . beautiful, heart stopping writing

Viv Groskop, OBSERVER 

See BILLY'S PLACE at 8 pm EST tonight and every Thursday on the Billy Stritch Facebook page HERE:

"I’ll be celebrating this week’s birthday legend, the unforgettable Judy Garland ... and the featured cocktail will be one of my favorites, the Lemon Drop Martini. It’s delicious and refreshing, but go slow because it sneaks up on you!

Here’s how you can make one at home -
2 ounces (1/4 cup) quality vodka (I’m partial to Grey Goose)
3/4 ounce (1 1/2 tablespoons) Cointreau or triple sec
1 ounce (2 tablespoons) fresh squeezed lemon juice (Juice from 1/2 large lemon)
3/4 ounce (1 1/2 tablespoons) simple syrup (but if you like it more tart, skip this)
Shake it all up until it’s really cold.
Line the rim of the glass with lemon juice and then dip it in sugar (this is my favorite part).
Pour it in a chilled martini glass and garnish with a nice lemon twist."

See Linda Lavin and Billy Stritch at 3 pm EST every Wednesday on the Linda Lavin Facebook page HERE