a midwest proposal

By Robbie on October 19, 2010

Modest, midwest, get it? Having committed the compound crime of a farfetched wordplay followed by explication, I will now go briefly over what happened on the night in question, in the obscure hamlet of Columbia, Missouri. It wasn't really "the other night" -- I'm looking at a backlog of story-grade events from the last few weeks, like the closing of "Our Town" in New York and the 5th grade sex education field trip -- but why gum up the narrative works. 

Jenny and I were playing in Columbia on a Thursday, and early in the week I got an e-mail from a fellow called Randy who wanted to propose marriage to his girlfriend in some way that would be a not-too-unnatural part of our show -- maybe musical, certainly public. Would I be open to the idea, and could I think of a framework that might put it over with the girl and the audience? (I use the last term even more loosely than usual when it comes to Columbia, Missouri.) 

This was a new area of le business show for me, though it's been done. Jenny said that a bandleader she works with had a fan undertake a pre-arranged proposal during a small-club show and the thing came off pretty badly. Not that the girl didn't assent, but that the moment, as performance, was an unqualified dud. People who haven't put on a show may not understand that "unqualified dud" is the clear and certain tendency of all entertainment endeavors, as entropy and decay are the clear and certain tendencies of natural systems; keeping a group of people from turning nastily on you or drifting off to the outdoor patio is positively heat-generating work. Despite this, I said yes immediately to Randy, or almost immediately, as soon as he verified that the chances of her saying no were vanishingly small. That might make a good show moment but it would be a terrible human-being moment.

I wanted to do this, very avidly, and only had to think how. On the drive down to Columbia, I stopped at a Walmart and got some paper and a sharpie, and in the parking lot I wrote four pages of rhyming stanzas. My plan was that on some pretext Jenny and I would play the awful doowop classic "Little Darling" by the Original Diamonds and on some other pretext I would hand off the basso recitation to a "random member of the audience" when it came around. Then Randy would just read off the page of stanzas. It included some facts on their relationship he had emailed me: they had met at a Big Star show, she was a social worker who'd been to tons of my shows all around the midwest, the cats and the cohabiting and all that kind of thing.

I texted Randy, te lling him to listen carefully to the "Little Darling" recitation and to make sure that he spoke clearly and near the mike, and read at a pace of one lyric line per bar of music followed by a bar of rest, like the 1957 recording. If he did that and she said yes, I felt sure it would come off great. The crucial factors as I saw them were his intelligibility, the unquestioned reality of the scene (the audience had to know that what they were seeing was just what it appeared to be, not only a sincere proposal of marriage but with the girl not knowing and the bit unrehearsed), and the craft of the writing.

On the way through St. Louis I pulled over again, at the airport to pick up Jenny. She was a little whipped because she'd been on a movie shoot for four long days in Detroit, then had a day back home in Brooklyn with her baby, and now this, red-state barrooms and backroads for five days. Her connecting flight out of Midway was delayed, and now I was in semi-white-knuckle mode on I-70. But the anticipation of getting to play music together again and especially to help two people achieve romantic satori took most of the edge off, I think.

At showtime there was no question of which one Randy was, thanks to his giant nerdy Big Star T-shirt. I passed them at the bar on my way to the dressing room and did what I hoped was a slow-glimmering, slightly curious double-take at the girl, Andrea, who I absolutely remembered and recognized from her being up front at countless shows in that region, over about ten years. "I know you -- you're..." I said, feigning for once what I am forever doing in earnest. "Aaa, ah, uh -- Anne..." I stammered. "Andrea," she finally said, and introduced me to her soon-to-be-ex-lover.

An hour and a half later, it was Rubicon time. The pretext problem I mentioned, devising and stating a motive for playing "Little Darling," was only a problem because it seemed to me ludicrous that either Jenny or I should ever trot out that song to inflict on people who had done us no harm. It's not like one of the check-out-how-good-this-song-secretly-is covers I've done. Neither is it funny, or amusing. It's just a bad, stupid song. So I decided my pretext would be: Here's a song that Jenny insisted we play. Nice of me, right? But you'll find upon re-examining the record that I never denied I was an asshole. "Here's one Jenny is really in love with," I said by way of introduction. "It's...I don't know, to me, it's...I'm not sold on the tune. But she thinks it's an excellent song, so there must be something I'm missing, and, here we go with the Original Diamonds masterpiece, 'Little Darling.'"

I got through the first two sung verses with what I hoped was a comic lack of conviction, gamely doing the chesty hiccuping routine that for some reason captivated our elders back in the Fifties, and hitting all the notes, but displaying little enthusiasm. Then, at the talking bit, I did the first line and a half before undergoing a sudden and total collapse of enthusiasm (again, feigning a natural everyday behavior). "This is just crap, I can't get behind it, I'm sorry. Would anyone from the audience be willing to do this part so we can get through the song? Look, I have the lyrics here, all you have to do...hey, you in the Big Star shirt," etc.

Randy, or rather his close cousin Stage Randy, had less than what you might call Sunday morning televangelist charisma, but that was ideal, because it helped to signal that even though the foregoing was a premeditated jape, this part was for real. He stood before the mike and spoke clearly and a little nervously, muffing a rest or two, charmingly, and laughing at a couple goofy lines when he got to them. The first page worked the metacommentary kind of angle, referring to Jenny's and my marvelous musicianship and Randy's apprehension at getting pulled into the limelight and you're-probably-wondering-why-I'm here. Then he started getting into how he and Andrea met, and how it was time to up the ante, from living in sin to living in boredom. From there it developed to a rather florid hullabaloo of love and admiration, addressed directly to Andrea, and I snuck in Noel Coward's phrase "You belong to the dawn of time." Time, you can probably guess, almost-rhymed with mine, as in "will you be," and Randy shakily fished out the ring from his pocket.

All through this the crowd response was good and bad. They were paying close attention to every line, but the laughs weren't coming as often as I had expected. I think the thing was a page too long -- it just dragged a little, and all those rests, even though they were about a second apiece, mounted up. There must have been close to 100 rests across the four pages, now that I think of it. What none of us anticipated, though, was that, unlike the rest of the room, Andrea was not paying that much attention to the words being recited. Once Randy took the stage, she got interested in taking pictures. She stood near the lip of the stage with her camera and moved from corner to corner, snapping. I'm not sure she was aware during pages one through three of the content of the lyrics. When your boyfriend is pulled onto a stage and made to quote Noel Coward, it's possible that you would embrace any device that would keep you from engaging with the meaning of it. When the ring came out, though, she was clued in, and she came on stage and accepted. When I say she accepted, I don't mean she said "yes." What she said, if I remember, was: "I guess I have to say 'yes.'" As a matter of performance etiquette and basic Second-City-style training, this was accurate. Don't deny. There was a churlish undertone to her acceptance, however, that I thought was uncalled for.

There were a few little things that I would improve next time, but all in all, the proposal wrapped in a musical joke went great, and made for a little moment that few of us who were present could ever forget. Congratulations to the happy couple. And if you ever need to stage a proposal at your show, that's how.