Bicoastal: For Bobby Darin at the Copa                     for my fathers In the summer of my sixteenth year, my stepfather got a pulpit in Beverly Hills he would have loved to have been permanent: Rabbi to the stars. We rented a furnished pad on Sunset Strip where many an afternoon it was the singer Jack Jones and me alone at the pool, only Jack’s deck chair was surrounded by an entourage: agents, managers, vocal coaches, toupees, gold chains, Hawaiian shirts, who yakked and gesticulated with cigars as batons about his current gig at the Coconut Grove, analyzing his previous night’s performance for what should be kept, what dropped; and I thought what a good singer he was-- (“though not as good,” both the fathers agreed, “as his father, Allan Jones, the tenor”)-- but that onstage he lacked the personal touch of Bobby Darin at the Copa when he stepped down and mingled among the audience and sang “Dream Lover” to a golden-haired little girl who would have been in kindergarten, and asked in a tender and intimate voice “How old are you darlin’?” and “Is the room too smoky for you?” My father’d consented to take me to see Darin at the Copa, because he’d read that the kid could really sing unlike the others he considered goons with pompadours who depended on echo chambers and tricks. From The Couple, first published in The New Republic