Louis Living!

After my MoMA adventures I was starving and in need of real food. The only thing I wanted in the world was a pizza, I didn't care what kind, it just needed to be pizza preferably from an Italian restaurant.

So I walk out of MoMA, cross the street and the first thing I see is an Italian flag. Thank god I think to myself, I walk up to it and it turns out it is a concrete company, can you imagine Italians and concrete!!! I was getting flashbacks to my childhood when my Italian grandfather tore up every blade of grass in his backyard, concreted it, built some wierd shanty type buildings in the backyard and then covered the whole place in grapevines, almost like it was a vineyard in the sky.

Fortunetly next to that place was a bistro called Pampillon which I knew is French for butterfly, so I thought this is going to be great. There is nothing I love more than a good french bistro. I asked to have lunch and they took me upstairs where there was this huge loft like space that was made from solid timber and then polished. It definently did look like an authentic French bistro, even if the menu was more than a little Americanised.



While I was waiting for my pizza to come all of a sudden out of nowhere this piano starts to play, I turn around and there is this big beautiful African American man sitting at the piano ( who kind of looked like Seal as a sidebar) and he started to sing. He mostly sang classic songs from the 50's and 60's but he did manage to play Coldplay, most of the Mamma Mia soundtrack and Memory from Cats, we were close to Broadway after all.

Secretly I really wanted to ask him to play as time goes by so that my illusion of him being Sam from Cascablanca would be complete, although at the time I hesitated because I thought it might be racist, but whatever. My favorite song that he played he introduced by saying "When I sing this song people often cry, but if you get the feeling you are about to cry, come and cry into my tip jar instead." Then he played What a Wonderful World and sang like he was Louis Armstrong. It was beautiful, I smiled at him, then cried.

My meal was over, I got up, put on my coat, tipped him $5.00, shook his hand and then left. He is the true definition of talent, and honestly that musical lunch thing whatever it was, is one of my top 5 things I did while in New York.