On Seeing Dionne Warwick

I was the youngest and my mother was the second youngest. Dionne Warwick was playing on a Saturday night at the Swinomish Casino in Anacortes in a room the size of a large conference room. Until about ten minutes before the show, we weren't sure the room would fill up at all. The man sitting beside my mother was already asleep. I was wearing the mint green cropped fur coat I had purchased two years ago for my wedding. The four esteemed male musicians who made up Dionne Warwick's band gathered on the stage in their tuxedos. They started playing the intro to Walk On By.

Would she come up the dark stairs on the side of the stage, or would she appear from behind the curtain? She came up the dark stairs, in her stiletto heels and super luxurious slate grey wide-legged satin pants, her black and white wrap swirling around the stage, flowing behind her, then in front of her, her hair pure white and her teeth just as white, and her cheekbones, oh her cheekbones, were so beautiful that my mother needed to pull a pair of opera glasses from her purse to ensure they were actually quite that sculpted, and to ensure Dionne Warwick's skin was actually as young (it couldn't be) and soft as it seemed.

My mother commented later that evening that it was hard for her to believe her daughter was at a Dionne Warwick show, and even harder to believe that her daughter knew all the words to the songs. She said hearing Dionne Warwick reminded her of where she was living and what she had experienced when the songs were first released in the 1960's, when she had seen performances on television, and when her own mother, my grandmother, had loved both Dionne Warwick and Burt Bacharach, the man who wrote much of her music. My own identification with Dionne Warwick's music came during years in college when I lived alone and gravitated toward powerful women vocalists like Barbra Streisand and Dionne Warwick and Carole King and Joni Mitchell and realized that I wanted a man and didn't need a man at the same time.

Seeing Dionne Warwick on stage was like going to summer camp, or having a spiritual experience, or knowing someone you love is about to move away. It was knowing the experience would never happen again, at least not like that, and when you're there and it's actually happening, you wish you could stay in that room a little bit longer. At some point in the show, somewhere in the middle, the lights went dark and Dionne Warwick started singing Alfie, and everyone applauded like it was what they had been waiting for, such a sad song, and when she sang it you could feel every bit of its sadness, and when I looked over my mother was crying, and we were sitting there in that casino, my mother and I, with this woman who talked about what she had learned from Sammy Davis, Jr., because she was from the time of Sammy Davis Jr., because she was Dionne Warwick, and I suddenly missed my grandmother, and the sun that shone on the carpeting when I heard Anyone Who Had a Heart for the first time, and I knew I could never explain it to anyone.