Three Mo’ Tenors, the operatic singing group … they’re simply amazing. Harmonically harmonizing since 2000, these classical jazzicians bring it home and are well worth the ticket price plus mo’.
Thomas Young, Roderick Dixon, and Victor Trent Cook, separately and together, are a staple of the New York scene. So I was blessed to see them many times during my New York tenure, primarily at Lincoln Center. You know Lincoln Center. The home of ‘The Metropolitan Opera’ and Wynton Marsalis. Da bomb. Classy. Seats your booty sinks in. Cushy backs so you’re comfortable. For the price the tickets cost, one should bring a blacket, curl up, and spend the night.
Hors douvres during intermission. Wine, chocolates, champagne. Think it’s the cheap kind, but the glasswear makes it coutoure, high coutoure.
Blue jeans, although permissible on Broadway and other houses, definitely de riguere. But you don’t have to go out and shop stupid – a pair of black pants, white blouse or sweater, nice scarf or chain, and you look as good as any of those society dames (and yes, they have moolah).
Three Mo’ Tenors. Gotta love them because they expose us to a part of our culture most of us rarely indulge in. If I had a thousand dollars for every black person I saw attend a New York Opera – I’d still be poor, but living with my mama, and daddy. Can’t leave him out. Y’all will have to meet mi pops sometime. He’s cool for an old dude.
Anyway, when Mr. Young, Mr. Dixon, and Mr. Cook dared to grace the stages of Chicago during the holiday – cha ching, an early Christmas present for me disguised with a bow for my sister.
Before I tell you about our evening, which you know must be butt funny because I’m writing about it, let me tell you why I love Chicago – black folks.
Did you get that?
Black folks.
I lose ten pounds of stress (which is was fat) when I’m around black folks.
Which should make us all understand, but not excuse, racism – we are comfortable around our own and that’s just the way it is.
Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t interact.
Doesn’t mean we don’t enjoy the interaction – George Clooney.
It does mean when we find those stress levels going up, since we all know what they are, we deal and move on.
Anyway, as a child, my summers were spent between 72nd and Ashland and 76th and Martin Luther King nee Park. In college, Pill Hill. As an adult, total south side. You can stay in Chicago for weeks on in and if you don’t venture from these areas, you would not know other folks share this city – until you watch the news.
Young, Dixon, and Cook.
At the UIC Pavillion.
With black folks.
I should have stayed home. Next time I will.
First problem – the only Pavillion I know is Pauley Pavillion – home of the world renowned but I usually don’t root for anymore UCLA Bruins. Nevertheless, it never dawned on me that there could be TWO basketball pavilions. And even if there were, surely UIC Pavillion could not be one of them because that’s where the Three Mo’ Tenors were performing. And they were tuxes. Several. And they perform opera. The real kind.
It was a basketball arena.
Why why why, you may ask, didn’t I ask my sister who has lived in Chicago all her adult life what kind of place the UIC Pavillion was?
Duh, uh. It was suppose to look like a Christmas gift, therefore the element of surprise was kinda necessary. Plus if you knew my sister, Chicago landmarks aren’t her strong suit. The girl is too smart for mensa but for all the time she has lived in Chicago she still doesn’t know where or what anything is … unless it’s on the south side with all the black folks, or near her Westside church, which is nothing but black folks, or near her office, where there are no black folks except the ones who commute in.
And I guess I could have asked my 2, 387 other relatives who live in Chicago … but … well … I just didn’t, okay.
So the whole evening was a surprise … for both of us.
We arrive. At the Pavillion.
She (my sister) said, ‘there it is.’
“There what is?” I asked.
“The Pavillion”, in that tone older sisters use when they find their younger siblings annoying – translation, their usual voice.
“Where?”
“There.”
“Where?”
“I said there.”
Trust me we went through where, there several times because I just couldn’t find what she was talking about.
And right here let me issue a half apology to my sister – she did know the Pavillion. But in my favor, it’s near her church and on the way to work – she can see if from the freeway. Half apology.
For me all I saw ‘there’ was a suburban (because it looked less than 30 years old) high school gym. She couldn’t mean …
“You’ve GOT to be kidding!”
But she wasn’t, and she used that tone again to let me know she wasn’t for several minutes, but she sounded like ‘blah, blah, blah, blah, blah’ because I was still looking at … an arena?? Still my head didn’t wrap around that it really was worse.
Which led to my second new experience: there were no cushioned seats. In fact the seats were plastic – hard molded orange and white plastic. And for those lucky few (us) who wanted orchestra seating after the plastic chairs sold out … why, we got folding chairs. Show nuff. Just like the ones churches keep in their basement or when they need some extra seats in the aisle. The ones that hurt your butt hades because let’s face it, black women got hips. And here in Chicago they carry an extra 25-30 pounds that you generally don’t see … outside the South. So to have those chairs. They were painful to sit in and painful to watch others get in.
One lady, poor thing … no I’m not going to talk about her because I have to believe she cannot help the width of her dip. But damn. I am not lying when I say half the hall turned to see how she would fit all, and I do mean aallllll, her blessings into those tight inflexible seats. But obviously she’d been in this situation before because she pushed down, scooped up, and drop that load down. The rest went in her lap. In one fell swoop. Pleased as punch. Until she was told by an usher that she was in the wrong seat. I don’t know who looked more chagrin – she or the people who realized she was going to have to climb over them to get to her real seat which was at the end of a row. Next to the handrail so you couldn’t scoot in from the other end. Note, this does not happen in a real concert hall.
Anyway, she found another seat. I, and quite a few other folks kept trying to find a comfortable bone to sit on in our seats. But it was all to no avail. And for those thinking, ‘with all those hips we had our own cushions’. Well that shows what you know. Fat gives, and when pushed down, it spreads leaving only a thin layer of suet to cover those hip bones. Those sharp hip bones. So uncomfortable is an understatement. By the time the concert started I needed an epidural and by the time it ended I wanted a hysterectomy.
Speaking of time, make this one #3 with #4 following: C(oncert) P(eople) time and C(olored) P(eoples) time do not use the same clock. 8:00, when it should have started – no concert. 8:05, 8:10. Even all the white people hadn’t shown up. 8:15, 8:16. Here comes the white folks. 8:17, 8:18. Here comes the black folks. 8:20, 8:23 …
Excuse me are these people eating nachos, popcorn, and I lie to you not … ribs. Robinson’s ribs. Now I don’t eat red meat or pork, but I have had my fair share in earlier days, but even if they were my daddy’s lip-lickin, bone suckin, sauce drippin ribs – YOU DON’T EAT RIBS AT AN INDOOR CLASSICAL CONCERT. YOU DON’T EAT ANY FOOD, EXCEPT MAYBE A MINT, AT AN INDOOR CLASSICAL CONCERT. THAT’S WHAT LOBBIES ARE FOR. But why get upset. Nobody else seemed to, except those who didn’t have a bone to chew on.
8:24, 8:26 the lights finally dim and I decided to dim my bad attitude. So my butt, back, neck, and sides were killing me. So it was so chilly I kept my coat on. So my view was partially blocked by a man who refused to remove his White Sox cap, even indoors. (I don’t know what his wife had on him or promised not to give him, but he made it clear he was there under booty protest.) So what that the couple behind us needed to … GET A ROOM. For the price of two tickets the Red Roof Inn would have worked.
So what there was a little boy who had better manners than most of the adults because he knew when the lights went down to shut the frick up and behave. So what the ushers didn’t know when, not how, to properly seat latecomers. So what I swore I smelt old gym socks and stale jock straps. So what, so what, so what …
The show was starting. The worst was over …
And you know what, in hindsight that really was true.
Not only were the three tenors in great form – a 9.7 on a 10 scale, they looked good. I have seen Placido and Luciano and they are great. But the tenors are better. And to prove it Thomas Young sang Pavarotti’s signature song, the one ‘Retha tore down at the Grammys – Nessun Dorma from Puccini’s opera Turandot. I love Pavarotti. Love me some ‘Retha. But Thomas Young sang the hades out of that song.
Cook and Dixon take their aria turns. Brava. Brava. In a fair world, all three would have lead roles in the best operas in the best opera houses in the world. But this isn’t a fair world, aptly described and delivered when Dixon sang the Coalhouse Walker tune from the Broadway musical Ragtime –
Go out and tell the story
Let it echo far and wide
How justice was our battleland
How justice was denied
Make them hear you – make them hear you.
And we did …
We heard them, and all the ‘Waiting to Exhale Sistahs’ who took us to church.
When Victor sang – ‘Were You There (when they crucified my Lord?”) the sistahs screamed, yes, yes”.
When they sang ‘Let the Good Times Roll’ the sistahs screamed, ‘I do, I do.’
And when they told us that ‘Betcha by golly why, we were the ones that they’d been waiting for forever’ … some sistahs … I’m sorry you can’t advertise that much desperation.
And on and on and on it went and in the end, despite not adapting to Chicago’s way of putting on the ‘Ritz’, the three mo’ tenors, and their backup sistahs were well worth the price and pain.
But just once.
From now on, I’m buying cd’s.
