Illustration by DG Strong

Yesterday I completed my review of the two Ethel Merman biographies and sent it to the editor in California. Actually, the review had written itself. This assignment was one I didn’t choose. It had belonged to my friend Doug, who died suddenly in December of a cerebral hemorrhage. Because Doug and I were working on a writing project together, his family gave me access to his laptop. I found the Merman assignment in his email correspondence with the editor, and I didn’t want anyone to think he was missing a deadline.

I knew just how to write this review. I channeled Doug, and the language just came. One of the reasons I loved Doug was that when I was with him I felt like my best self — smart, articulate, funny, spontaneous. He loved language for the idiosyncrasies it had to offer. He could slide from polite conversation into something just this side of naughty, and this tendency gave others permission to answer in kind. He hooked into every innuendo, and he always made me laugh.

Doug and I were working on a book of interviews with the great singers of our time. He was also my teacher and vocal coach. He was a good writer and a great interviewer: more Dick Cavett than Johnny Carson, with maybe a little Groucho Marx thrown in. He was truly interested in what other people had to say and in the way they said it. His ear was attuned to every nuance, and he was able to follow the other person’s lead without losing focus. Two weeks before he died we talked to Andrea Marcovicci, the reigning queen of cabaret, at the Algonquin before her evening’s performance in the Oak Room, and it occurred to me that he would have been at home at the legendary Round Table.

When I helped clear out his apartment, I picked up a few of the books that would otherwise have gone into the discard pile. The one I value most is an old collected Emily Dickinson with the pages falling out and the first lines of his favorite poems written on a blank page in the front.  He was not a pack rat, so the books he had were the ones he wanted close by. Emily was the only poet he kept.

I was Doug’s writing mentor, just as he was my mentor for cabaret. He wanted to know “the rules” that I used as an editor, the en dashes and em dashes and why a comma was important here and not there. He told me that he heard sentences differently than I did, that his punctuation was more like Emily Dickinson’s — short phrases strung together with hyphens designating breath and inflection. Kind of like the songs he loved.

We sent each other the writing we completed over the last couple of months. After I’d sent him a review of a piece of “literary fiction,” he met me at the door, saying “Hello, Miss Fluidity Dénouement.” I liked having my own words quoted back to me as if they were the name of a drag queen.

Some time before that I had shown him an essay I’d written about the poet May Swenson, which started with an allusion to Emily Dickinson. He read the first couple of sentences in my presence, then looked up at me and said very slowly, “tell it slant,” greeting that familiar phrase like an old friend.