Subways are for Sondheim

Don't let anyone know, but real New Yorkers are friendly. It's just that our reserves of friendliness and politeness have to be spread out over the gajillion or so people that we see each day, so we have to hold back a bit. You're not a real New Yorker, however, until you've designated a specific handful of people to be nice to each day. There's the reserved homeless person who you give a buck to (and therefore are absolved from all other panhandlers for the day), the guy at the newspaper stand who knows exactly which candy you want, and a handful of other semi-regular people who get a greeting throughout the day.

One of the handful is the early morning token booth clerk at the 181st Street A train station (yes, they're still token booths, even if they no longer sell tokens there). I guess that she works an 11pm-7am shift, or something similar, since it's not at all unusual for me to catch her coming home from a late night out, and then see her the next morning as I trudge off to work at some ungodly early hour. At any rate, I've been giving her a smile and a wave for a couple of years, which gets reciprocated every time.

Yesterday morning, however, I had to buy a metrocard from one of the vending machines next to the booth (only the machines take credit cards, for reasons beyond my meager ability to understand), and I hear a jazz singer singing "No one's gonna hurt you, no one's gonna dare..."

Okay, a quick interruption for those who didn't recognize the lyric. The song is called "Not While I'm Around," it's from Sweeney Todd, one of my favorite musicals by my Stephen Sondheim, by far and away my favorite theatre composer. The song has particular significance to me, as it's the first Sondheim song that I fell in love with (blame my parents, who made the mistake of leaving this album out where an impressionable 18-year-old could listen to it), and was the progenitor of my Sondheim obsession. At any rate, I have several recordings of the song, but had only heard one jazz version (a fairly weak one on the otherwise excellent Trotter Trio recording). This one, however, was absolutely stunning. Upon querying the clerk, I found out that the singer's name is Veronica Nunn, and the song appears on her debut album. She also has a website with the full song as a sample (actually, she sings it as a medley with Gladys Rich's "American Lullaby." Not the most perfect pairing, but who cares?), and it's good to know that it sounds just as stunning now as it did at 5:30 in the morning (when my brain really doesn't acknowlege anything). I'm really curious to hear what she does with "Green Finch and Linnet Bird" (another Sweeney song, but not one that I'd think of as lending itself to a jazz treatment, what with it being a soprano aria and all...).