Dreamtime Alice - Hardcover

Sayer, Mandy

 
9780345423320: Dreamtime Alice
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0345423321 ISBN 13: 9780345423320
Verlag: Ballantine Books, 1998

Inhaltsangabe

"I danced and danced because the neon light across the road had just blinked on, because it was the middle of spring, because I was twenty-one, because my father was playing beside me. . . ."

In this vivid, seductive, gorgeously written memoir, Mandy Sayer recounts the fascinating years she spent performing on the streets of New York and New Orleans with her father. Gerry Sayer was a jazz drummer, a beguiling Irish charmer with a million stories and an insatiable love for jam sessions and all-night parties. Mandy grew up captivated by his outrageous tales even after he left the family for good and her mother descended into the distance of drink. When her siblings failed him by rejecting the bohemian performing life, Mandy saw her chance to become a character in his stories, part of the only life he really loved. So she learned to tap-dance, and they set off together to satisfy their grand ambitions on the toughest stage in the world--New York.

Driven by their dream of making it big, Mandy and Gerry arrived in the city with no place to stay and only costumes to their names. They became part of the thrilling, precarious world of street performers--jugglers, magicians, fire-eaters, dancers--who eked out their livings at the mercy of the elements, the cops, complaining neighbors, and lurking thieves. In cinematic detail, Sayer tells of the first exhilarating season in New York City, earning $200 a night on Columbus Avenue; offsetting the physical pain of endless performance with the incomparable rush that accompanied it; the long, difficult winter in New Orleans, surviving on avocados and raw vegetables in unheated apartments; and their final unforgettable return to New York.

Entwined with this singular story of a busker's life is the deeper, more intimate story of Mandy's transformation from a girl searching for her father's love into a woman who could invent her own language and find her own voice. For ultimately Dreamtime Alice is a triumphant record of a young woman's discovery that she could create her own story at last.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Mandy Sayer studied tap dancing with Cookie Cooks and Brenda Buffalino and later joined the Bill Evans Dance Company. Her first novel, Mood Indigo, won The Australian/Vogel Award in 1989; her latest, The Cross, was a finalist for the Ned Kelly Award for Best First Crime Novel and has been nominated for the 1997 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. She has also been named one of the ten Best Young Australian Novelists by the Sydney Morning Herald. She received an M.A. in creative writing from Indiana University.

Aus dem Klappentext

ed and danced because the neon light across the road had just blinked on, because it was the middle of spring, because I was twenty-one, because my father was playing beside me. . . ."<br><br>In this vivid, seductive, gorgeously written memoir, Mandy Sayer recounts the fascinating years she spent performing on the streets of New York and New Orleans with her father. Gerry Sayer was a jazz drummer, a beguiling Irish charmer with a million stories and an insatiable love for jam sessions and all-night parties. Mandy grew up captivated by his outrageous tales even after he left the family for good and her mother descended into the distance of drink. When her siblings failed him by rejecting the bohemian performing life, Mandy saw her chance to become a character in his stories, part of the only life he really loved. So she learned to tap-dance, and they set off together to satisfy their grand ambitions on the toughest stage in the world--New York.<br><br>Driven by their dream of making it

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It was back into the Manhattan subway system that Gerry and I
wandered in search of Columbus Avenue. We'd awakened after only four
hours' sleep and had spent the rest of the day practicing for our great
Upper West side debut. We were still feeling the effects of the coke, and
rather enjoyed the sight of ourselves bungling through the turnstiles with
a plywood tap board, cassette player, side drum, stands, cowbells,
woodblocks, and my wooden case.

Navigating was left up to me, racing ahead of my father in my
eagerness, for Gerry doesn't have much sense of direction. (Once, when I
planned to part with him on 42nd Street and meet up with him again on
34th, he was convinced he'd get lost along the way.)

I bounced up the platform to find the subway map. As I stood
studying its network of colored veins, out of the corner of my eye I saw
a man dressed in sneakers and a woman's thigh-length jacket. I glanced at
the map, then back at him, finally realizing he was standing there
masturbating, as if he were at home, alone in his own bathroom. The few
people nearby didn't seem to take any notice. After he finished raining
onto the tracks, he looked at his right hand as if he might discover his
fortune in it, then wiped it on the sleeve of his jacket.

When I'd finished inspecting the map, I returned to Gerry and told
him we were catching the A train. He seemed more interested in that piece
of information than my anecdote about the masturbating man. He began
scatting Ellington's famous introduction to the song, and I bobbed up and
down and couldn't help but sing the lyrics.


The A train didn't stop at 72nd Street, but thundered all the way
up to 125th, the subway stations flashing by like frames in a film. The
song was right: It was the quickest way to get to Harlem. I vowed to
Gerry I would learn to read the maps better. We waited around for about
fifteen minutes, then lugged all our gear onto the B train. By the time
we emerged from the 72nd Street subway station, it was pushing half-past
eight. We found ourselves marching by the Gothic spires of the Dakota, a
sprawling stone apartment block that looked more like a Transylvanian
castle, complete with black iron gates and a doorman with a toothy smile.
I imagined John Lennon's blood on my shoes, that I was leaving red
footprints along the sidewalk as we drew toward the hazy glow of Columbus
Avenue.

The intersection at which we found ourselves looked promising,
busy with handsome people promenading up and down, no doubt in search of
the latest outdoor cafe or Japanese restaurant, taking their time, wanting
to be seen by each other, gazing into boutiques boasting hundred-dollar
dresses and Levis with holes already worn into the knees.

The widest corner was the one outside the Chemical Bank. As we
warmed up, a crowd began to grow around us. Like the old pros we
considered ourselves to be, we didn't rush in willy-nilly to entertain
them, but continued to prepare ourselves for the coming night. I suppose
you could call it a kind of street performer's foreplay. Gerry had his
head down and allowed the triple parradiddles to escape from his snare
while I turned my back to the audience and no doubt showed off with some
fancy step I could never quite work into a routine.

New Yorkers simply drool over anything new. Telephones shaped
like Einstein's head (the top lifts off and you speak into his
cerebellum), dresses made out of parachutes, pet iguanas you can walk on a
leash, singing toothbrushes, tattooed foreskins, and cinnamon cigarettes.
I don't think I'm kidding myself when I admit that the reason they
hoorahed us and made airplanes out of their bills and flew them into our
bucket was because we were different. A welcome change from the Italian
magician on the corner of 71st. We weren't like Ralph the Button Man or
the breakdancers farther up who spun on their heads and backs across
flattened cardboard boxes. Had we announced ourselves, our accents would
have charmed them even more, but we were naive young pups back then, and
it would be quite a few months before we realized our tongues increased
our earning power.

We wanted to be like them. Our act, and when I say act, I mean
the act we lived as well as the literal act on the street, was an homage,
a tribute to their music and dance, from Louis Armstrong to Thelonius
Monk, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson to Gregory Hines. We were just too green
then to realize that their hoots and howls were mostly just an expression
of their love of something new. The crowd up there was young and white
and would probably go home that night and listen to Madonna or Billy Idol.

Someone went mad with a Polaroid and it began spitting out
pictures of us on that corner. In the break the photographer gave me a
damp image that would join the scores that would be taken over the
following years on the streets. Slipped into a folder under the bed in
which I now write, the images look like an assembly of orphans. The
cities and backdrops change, but the atmospheres are consistently urban,
and there was always some roving photographer with a penchant for the
romantic who caught me at a tired moment between shows, slumped on my
wooden case and tightening the loose taps on my shoes.

In the photograph, I'm wearing black stockings, a short-sleeved
leotard, a gray and white cotton waistcoat, and a top hat. From the angle
at which the photograph is taken, Gerry's right drumstick seems much
longer than it could have actually been, and it looks as if he's jabbing
me in the leg with it. But we are grinning, oh yes. We and the crowd are
having a scandalously good time. You can almost hear the celebratory,
euphoric noise pressing through the gloss of the photographic paper.

The photograph, of course, does not anticipate what happened
during the next break only a few minutes later. I was taking a long pull
on a bottle of water when I looked up to see four black men scowling down
at me. They were all well over six feet tall, and were elevated even
further by virtue of the roller skates strapped to their feet.

"This is our spot!" cried a man with a red sweatband around his
head.

His mate, dressed only in a pair of shorts, skated in a wide arc
across the corner as if he were marking out his territory.

"We work here every night!" added a third.

The crowd obviously didn't want to get involved and gradually
drifted off.

I hugged my water bottle to my chest and meekly produced the
street performer's hackneyed refrain: "But we were here first."

"This is ours," volleyed back the red headband. "We've worked
here two years."

I stumbled a bit with my return. A pathetic cliche I'd heard
guitar players swap in Sydney's Central Station tunnel: "But you don't own
it."

Already the others were skating in circles and figure eights
across the sidewalk, careening dangerously close to Gerry's snare drum,
fanning us eith the breeze their darting bodies created. What I now call
Pitch Etiquette was ambiguous to me then, when we were just beginning to
feel our way through the busker's cloudy moral universe.

When the red sweatband shouted that they needed this particular
corner because of the smooth concrete with which it was paved, it seemed
like a good enough excuse to me and we packed up our gear and left.

We straggled on up the avenue, still trying to maintain the
nervous optimism that had propelled us into the night. On the other side
of the street...

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Verlag
Ballantine Books
Erscheinungsdatum
1998
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0345423321
ISBN 13 
9780345423320
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
333
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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