By Richard Skipper***Over the past few weeks, I have been thinking a great deal about the people who show up. Not just the entertainers who step onto a stage, but the audiences who buy tickets, the musicians who accompany us, the people who run our venues, and those who quietly encourage us to keep going when the next booking seems a long way off.
In September, I took Richard Skipper Celebrates! Life Lessons from Legends to Fire Island and then to Club Café in Boston. Both experiences reminded me why I continue doing this after so many years in LIVE entertainment. My show is built around a simple idea: the audience is part of the conversation. Before each performance, people submit questions, which are selected at random throughout the evening. I never know exactly where those questions will lead us. Sometimes they bring back a memory I haven’t thought about in years. Sometimes they lead to a story about Carol Channing or another entertainer who influenced my life. And sometimes an audience member’s question becomes the beginning of an entirely different conversation. That unpredictability is something I have come to treasure.
Marilyn Maye taught me that the audience is the star. I understand that lesson more deeply with every passing year. We may prepare the songs and rehearse the material, but what happens between an entertainer and an audience cannot be rehearsed. It has to happen in the moment.
I’ve also been thinking about how much responsibility we have to one another within our entertainment community. Every Monday, as I put together my Newsletter, I hear about artists preparing new shows, returning to familiar rooms, or stepping onto a cabaret stage for the first time. Some have devoted their entire lives to entertaining. Others have discovered this world after successful careers in completely different fields. What they share is a willingness to tell their stories.
Recently, I wrote about Rian Keating, whose new show explores his relationship with his merchant-seaman father through songs about the sea. I also wrote about Ronni Faust, who built a successful career in broadcasting before retiring and discovering cabaret. Two very different journeys, yet both remind us that the experiences we carry into a song can be just as important as the notes themselves.
And then there is the question of who will preserve these stories. Rian’s old television interviews with entertainers such as Gwen Verdon and Julie Wilson are available for us to revisit. My own years of conversations with members of the Hello, Dolly! family have taught me that memories are precious, particularly when they come directly from the people who lived them. We cannot assume those stories will always be available tomorrow. Later this month, I’ll return to San Francisco after twenty years for my debut at Feinstein’s at the Nikko. I look forward to seeing familiar faces and meeting people whose stories I have yet to hear.
But I want to encourage something that costs very little. Reach out to an entertainer whose work has meant something to you. Tell a musician what you appreciated about their playing. Introduce someone to a show they might otherwise miss. Buy a ticket when you can. And when you see something worthwhile, talk about it. We spend a great deal of time celebrating careers after they are over. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we made an equally determined effort to celebrate people while they are here to enjoy it?
That’s what Celebrating Now means to me. Who are YOU celebrating today?
