A gelatinous cube of fury

The Alley is a piano bar in Oakland, roughly a three-mile walk from here. It's a piano bar with a history (founded in 1933!); its pianist, Rod Dibble, has been playing there for over 50 years (!)(he's in his 80s now). You can definitely feel that history when you walk in; as a refugee from the east coast piano bar scene, it comforted me. The interior of the bar is dark panelled wood; there are business cards attached to the walls- roughly 50,000 of them- as well as other memorabilia. The Alley also serves as a steakhouse (although they'd stopped serving by the time I got there, which is just as well; I didn't need to hear clanking silverware during the set); the dinner tables are towards the front, with a ring of seats around the piano itself (rather like Marie's Crisis in Greenwhich Village, if you've been). The patrons seated around the piano are clearly there for singing; they pass a microphone around, and take turns doing numbers (mostly from 1930s-50s: when I walked in, someone was doing "Brush Up on Your Shakespeare"), with Rod Dibble doing the occasional number himself.

For a while, I just stood to the side and watched; I'm not best familiar with music from that period, and my singing voice is rusty, to put it kindly. It was interesting to watch the interactions between the regulars, to see who knew each other well (most of them) and who seemed newer; one of the men looked quite a bit like baldanders, and one of the women had a singing voice so much like sykii's, I kept doing double takes. Finally, there was a break; Rod Dibble left the room, and many of the regulars said goodnight. One of the customers sat down behind the piano (after asking Rod first), and started some jazz-oriented noodlings; the girl with the singing voice like Sykii's started a Patsy Cline number. He finished; there was a pause. "Er..." I finally said, "you don't happen to know 'Take Me Home, Country Roads,' do you?"

He didn't, really, but it was all right; he did some low-key vamping, and I carried the melody, with a couple of the other customers coming in on the chorus. (For those who are new to this journal: a group of friends and I used to meet regularly on Thursday nights at a piano bar called Rose's Turn- now closed, alas- and I used to sing this song regularly there. While the gods know when I'll see most of those people again, it was quite a comforting memory.) The song ended; there was some applause; Rod came back, and, in a moment of madness, I did "Send in the Clowns" with him (first time I've ever done that song) and it went OK. With a three-mile walk home ahead of me (walking past Lake Merritt, which had lights hung in strings at its shore, their reflections looking like luminescent smears in the lake's dark surface), I didn't want to stay too late, but it was definitely a lovely evening.