The same moment El Walker hit the floor at the Pink Slipper Gentlemen’s Club in Plainview, a performer who had recently begun calling herself “Audrey Crawford” sat down at a piano onstage at the Simon Theater in Chicago. Even before the welcoming applause had faded, she wished she had chosen different attire for this venue. Her gown was silver lamé—vintage, more than fifty years old. Its long, clinging sleeves had looked great in her mirror at home and just as good in the dressing room here at the theater. But the damn thing was hot. Sweat ran along Audrey’s hairline beneath the blond wig she wished she could rip from her head. No, she’d been taught as a youngster that horses sweat, men perspire, and ladies glow. She wasn’t sweating; she was glowing her ass off. As soon as she returned home, she would take a pair of scissors to those silver sleeves, if not to prepare the dress for the next time she wore it, then at least to exact revenge on it.
The gown and wig did make her look glamorous in an old-movie-star way—from a distance, at least. She knew how to move elegantly onstage and, hot or not, the silver dress was flattering. Both her look and her name—a combination of Audrey Hepburn and Joan Crawford—were perfect fits for the Simon Theater, a former neighborhood movie house that had been renovated in the style of a 1950s supper club.
The Simon Theater had been a movie palace in the 1920s and then a burlesque house, a dirty-movie joint, a foreign-film venue, and an eyesore slated for demolition. But it had managed to survive urban decay and gentrification to live again in its latest form, having kept, all along, the surname of its original owner, Mr. Arthur Simon. The attractive and well-constructed neon sign that bore Mr. Simon’s name had proved to be more expensive to remove or replace than to repair. And so, with each incarnation, the place remained the Simon Theater.
Audrey’s stage name had come to her in a flash of inspiration when she’d arrived at the theater to audition. Well, it hadn’t exactly been a formal audition. She had been walking past the theater on a hot day and had seen that the front doors of the establishment were propped open, allowing a cool, air-conditioned breeze to escape onto the sidewalk. The promise of relief from the heat had summoned her. She hadn’t even noticed the piano onstage until she was inside, fanning herself in front of a magnificent oak bar. Once Audrey had seen the piano, black and lustrous under the lights, what else was she supposed to do but the thing she had always done? She’d made her way through half-moon-shaped tables ringed by repurposed movie theater seats, stepped onto the stage, and begun to play and sing.
The current owner of the theater, and the person who had given Audrey her job, was a young man with a taste for the music and aesthetics of his parents’ and grandparents’ generations. He was also an ambitious real estate hustler who had leveled historic buildings in a five-block radius around the theater to build unsightly, overpriced condominiums. He had left the Simon and its neon sign in place so he could save a few dollars and proclaim himself a preservationist. The day Audrey had wandered in, he had been in the theater to oversee the final stages of the renovation, not to audition lounge singers. When he’d climbed up to the main floor from the storeroom to discover Audrey—the third neighborhood eccentric to sneak inside that day—he hadn’t had the energy to yell at her as he’d yelled at the previous intruders. He had walked behind the bar and poured himself a club soda, intending to simply wait her out.
He’d listened to two old ballads, followed by a salty blues song, and then he’d offered her a job. When he’d asked her name, she had looked around at the red velvet curtains, the cushioned theater seats, and the film posters—all remnants of a more gracious era—and renamed herself Audrey Crawford, after her two favorite movie stars.
She performed most weeknights and did the early shows on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. Her style was too low-key for the late-night weekend audiences. What Audrey did well was what she was doing now. She played the piano. She sang. She talked.
She specialized in themed evenings. She picked a topic and gathered songs from her vast repertoire to go with it, though she never planned out exactly what she was going to play. Often she just talked and let the themes come to her. She ended her sets when her voice gave out or the bartender signaled for her to take a break, whichever came first.
That evening, perspiring under the lights in her silver lamé, she quietly rolled chords and tinkled tunes on the piano, speaking to about one hundred people, a good turnout for the Sunday after-dinner set.
“I was born in a little town called Plainview, Indiana,” Audrey said.
A young man in the audience yelled, “Woo-hoo! State U!” The woman sitting with him woo-hooed back at him.
Audrey said, “Proud alumni in the house tonight.” She played a snippet of State U’s fight song, and the young man howled again.
“I don’t know much about the university side of town. I grew up on the side where the drunks weren’t young or cute, and showing off your smarts was more likely to get you beat down than get you laid.”
She talked about Plainview that night because her hometown had been on her mind. She had awakened with a picture in her head of fireflies in the summer evening sky. Plainview sat in a valley, and from June to August, legions of lightning bugs flashed on and off in the surrounding hills, like a continuous, distant fireworks display. That image was so clear she was sure she must have been dreaming of home during the night. At breakfast, she had found herself thinking of how the trees on those hills appeared to absorb the fog just after dawn. Like magic. Had the place really been that beautiful? The morning’s memories almost made her want to return to Indiana to have another look. Almost.
Around lunchtime, Audrey recalled the smell of southern Indiana air on the first warm afternoons of spring—mossy, green, and alive. As she walked along the Chicago pavement on her way to the theater, her mind leapt back to the elastic quality of the earth beneath her bare feet when she’d strolled the Indiana woods after a light rain shower. Plainview lacked so much, but that day she remembered the qualities that had made her hometown wonderful for short bursts of time.
“Plainview wasn’t such a good place for me. You’ve heard the story. Bad daddy, dead mama, poor innocent waif facing the nasty old world on her own.” Audrey played the opening phrase of “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.” “But one day a voice whispered in my ear. It said, ‘Child, you better put a swing in your hips and march your fine ass on away from here if you wanna live.’ So I left Plainview and I made a new home here.
“Tonight, folks, I’ll be performing songs about home.” She surprised herself with that one. She had thought she was going to sing about friendship. But now that she’d changed course, songs about home it would be. She said, “Home is where the hate is, right?”
“Heart!” the State U graduate yelled back at her.
Audrey winked at him. “Like I said, college boy, we knew totally different sides of town.”
She crescendoed through a series of arpeggios, intending to make her way toward the opening of “Green, Green Grass of Home.” Instead, she surprised herself again by launching into the introduction to the unofficial state song of Indiana, a tune she hadn’t sung since the year her fourth-grade music teacher had drummed it into her head.
Well, this is as good a place to start as any.
She pursed her lips to blow away the droplet of perspiration that dangled from the tip of her nose. Then she crooned, “Back home again, in Indiana…”