Encore: Chapter 45

“You realize you made it, Portman, right? Like, you’ve arrived?”
The music wasn’t great and now the singing would be bad too, Shuey Portman thought with dismay.
This was the thing with Rabbi Wasser, Shuey sometimes felt: The Rosh Yeshivah made decisions without understanding the whole picture.
Rabbi Wasser wasn’t musical, and he knew it, yet he was making demands on Shuey that didn’t make much sense from a musical perspective.
The idea had seemed great at first — a single featuring Shuey and the bochurim — but now it had turned into a big headache. The song they’d chosen, “Aromimcha,” had a current feel, Shuey thought. He’d composed it back then during his singing days, but it hadn’t made it onto any album. Now Shuey was excited about the chance to get it out there. Korman and Zeldman, who were sort of running the project, were excited about it too — it was a catchy-enough song — and Shuey had allowed himself to open doors in his memory that he hadn’t touched in years.
He was that excited.
And his room was quiet and lonely enough that there was time and space to think.
Last night, he’d just sat in the large, discolored easy chair — a relic from the hotel — and let the memories flow. They were mainly happy and pleasant, many of them long buried — neither thrilling nor hurtful enough to have left a permanent mark — and as he immersed himself in them, he could smell the disinfectant used in the dressing rooms, the eerie warmth of the spotlights.
Singing had made him happy. Now he could admit that. And leaving singing had been like leaving camp at the end of the summer: He got it, it was time, life goes on, but deep down it doesn’t really leave you.
He remembered the early days, the concert in Florida on Chol Hamoed with his parents in the audience, after which his father had said, “If you take your job seriously and yourself seriously, there’s no reason singing has to be a bizayon.”
He remembered the flush of early, unexpected success, when the distributor, Danny, had said, “You realize you made it, Portman, right? Like, you’ve arrived?”
Oops! We could not locate your form.