Vacation dose of dope
On a cool damp night
Looking out at that misty light
Having drunk much more than I ought to drink
An appropriate time for a dose of Lilac Wine
Best known in the inimitable voice of Nina Simone
Though Eartha Kitt’s version from 1953 is characteristically saucy
It was actually originally composed by James Shelton in 1950 and performed by Hope Foye in a Broadway musical called Dance Me a Song, that ran for only 35 performances at the Royale Theatre on 45th Street
Side note: Bob Fosse (who was from Chicago, a product of Ravenswood Elementary and Amundsen High School!), made his Broadway debut in this same revue
Check out this bio of Foye, which describes the admiration and inspiration of Paul Robeson:
https://www.presstelegram.com/2008/03/21/singers-story-comes-to-light-at-last/
An underappreciated artist and activist who lived a good portion of her prime essentially in exile, a victim of McCarthyism
But today’s dose is another cover, true to the song’s origins in theater
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVaUkg3OzVY
Novella Nelson is appreciated, if at all, for her work on the stage and screen
She was born in Brooklyn in 1939
Her dad was a taxi driver, and her mom was a secretary at Women’s Wear Daily, an influential fashion magazine
Both parents were active in the church
But it was a Black Israelite congregation
Services on Saturday
She recounts that she was sometimes chased home from school, being taunted as a “Black Jew”
In her daughter’s words, Novella was “a nerd”; the first in her family to go to college
She was on her way to majoring in Biochemistry at Brooklyn College
With such a tough major, she took an elective in Speech, looking for an easy A to boost her GPA
But it turned out to be essentially a course in acting, and Novella was seduced by the magic of the stage
She was cast to play Berenice in The Member of the Wedding (played in the movie by Ethel Waters)
As she would later describe, “the only way I can say it is that I kind of had an orgasm during the course of the play…It happens when you are so one with the character.”
And that climactic experience set off the rising action of a career in drama
She switched majors to theater and after graduation went on act off-Broadway, on-Broadway, in Hollywood, and in many tv series (including many guests spots on Law & Order!)
She also directed
Throwback to an earlier dose: she played Harriet Tubman in a 1970 episode of the CBS historical docudrama series “You Are There”
In the late 60s, she was hanging out at Upstairs at the Downstairs, a club in the Village which featured both musical and comedy acts (it was, as you can guess, a split-level establishment)
She scoffed at the on-stage entertainment, bragging to her table that she could easily outdo the singer performing
The manager overhead her, and told her to put up or shut up
Sure enough, she won him and the crowd over
And began a regular gig to help supplement the unsteady income of an actor
In 1970, she even got in the studio to produce an album, on the aptly-named Arcana label
Discogs only lists 3 other sides issued in its history (though I won’t vouch for the accuracy of a site that claimed that the Class-Set record was arranged by the brother of *the* James Baldwin ?)
Like her acting career, Nelson’s sole musical record eschews any easy typecasting
And appears to have been recorded live (at a club in the Village? who knows, no setting is listed…)
There are a couple tunes associated with Nina Simone
Including I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free
And Lilac Wine
As befits a thespian, she gives a lot of dramatic reading to her interpretations
She doesn’t have Eartha’s sinister sultry laugh
Or Nina’s depth
But I dare say her rendition is the haziest–and booziest–of them all!
