December 2–9, 1999

noises off

Homecoming Queen

Her blood may be blue, but her heart’s in honky tonk.

The atmosphere last Saturday night at Tavern on Camac’s weekly cabaret was heady with Memory, and I’m not talking about the song. The stars of the evening, Carolyn Montgomery and Michael Ogborn, brought the memories with them: Michael played his first piano bar gigs in the downstairs room when the place used to be called Raffles, and Carolyn — well, Carolyn’s memories are best explained by telling you about her family, most of whom, it seemed, were in the room.

Carolyn is a Main Line Montgomery, which means she’s about as Main Line as you can get. Her paternal grandfather, Archibald Rogers Montgomery, "had something to do with Montgomery County," she says with off-handed pride. His first cousin — Carolyn called her "Aunt Hope" — was Hope Montgomery Scott, the inspiration for the recklessly charming Tracy Lord character played by Katherine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story. Her maternal grandfather was George Randolph Packard, founder of both the Merion Cricket Club and the Radnor Hunt, and her great grandfather was William Clothier, whose brother Isaac founded a department store you may have heard about.

That’s a lot of baggage for a cabaret singer (albeit first-class baggage). And even though Carolyn, 35, clearly feels a deep connection with Ogborn’s sometimes brash, sometimes wistful songs of street corners and honky-tonk temples and showbiz wannabes, she could still pass as a Main Line post-deb, a tall (5-foot-10) blonde with bangs and a toothy smile.

So what’s a nice girl like her doing in a biz like this?

It’s something her family’s wondered about, she acknowledges from her NY apartment a few days after her Tavern on Camac performance (to be repeated this Saturday at 8).

"I think it’s been really difficult. They’ve watched me really scraping by as a bartender, not getting enough singing work," she says, explaining that the family ethic has always been that "the child makes his or her own way and doesn’t ask for help." Whatever family money is coming to her she’ll inherit after her parents’ deaths.

"Of course my father would have loved it if I’d gone off to law school and been a trial lawyer. I probably would have enjoyed myself. But singing was my passion."

It’s easier on them, too, she says, for the simple reason that she’s good.

"If I was marginally talented they’d have told me."

She is good. Good enough to graduate with honors from the Peabody Conservatory of Music. Good enough to survive dinner theater, a traveling gig with a jazz band, five years in Provincetown, MA, even "a major detour" into the Miss America Pageant system (she was Miss Baltimore). Good enough now to be a regular at some of the top cabarets in New York — Don’t Tell Mama, Eighty-Eight’s, the Firebird — and good enough to warrant a 1999/2000 cross-country tour.

	Her maternal grandfather founded the Merion Cricket Club. She called Hope Montgomery Scott "Aunt Hope." And her great grandfather was William Clothier, whose brother Isaac founded a department store you may have heard about.

Singer/composer/piano man Ogborn is a longtime Philadelphia favorite now living in New York. His Box Office of the Damned was a big hit for 1812 Productions, and now the Arden has snagged an NEA grant to fund a workshop of Baby Case, his new musical about the Lindbergh baby kidnapping. Carolyn met him one night about three years ago when he was playing at an Upper East Side club called Regent’s. ("I thought he was adorable.") They began rehearsing together casually, until Carolyn suggested she do a show made up solely of his songs.

The result (directed by Jay Rogers, the brilliant comic actor from the off-Broadway hit When Pigs Fly) is a remarkably seamless revue. In fact, some of the numbers seem so organically connected to Montgomery’s wry autobiographical anecdotes and raucous characterizations that it’s hard to believe they belong anywhere else.

For instance, both "In the Temple of the Honky Tonk" and "Boa, Boa, Boa" come from Ogborn’s "Gay ’90s" revue Regalia, but you’d never know it. Montgomery turns the former into a sardonic hymn to sing-alongs from a woman who’s been there, sung that. And in the hilarious "Boa," Montgomery morphs into 50-something suburban housewife Susan Palladino, meeting her first drag queen, trying on her first boa and screaming "Moa, moa, moa!"

Carolyn’s clan — a "huge parade of WASPy-seeming giants," she calls them — numbered about 30 strong at the cabaret. They seemed a bit subdued at first. Maybe it was the unlikely surroundings: The Tavern, in addition to its cabaret and restaurant, also houses a lively gay bar. Or maybe it was sheepishness at being delayed by dinner downstairs, their progress regularly monitored by announcements over the PA system. ("My mother was mortified," says Carolyn.) But after a while they melted, enjoying the real-life parallels in songs like "The Boy for Me," about a little girl’s crush on her older sister’s boyfriend. ("I fell in love with all my sister’s boyfriends," says Carolyn.)

The most moving moment came during "Pieces of My Heart." It’s a song from C’est La Guerre!, a musical about the age of AIDS, but its words of love and loss carry weight no matter what the context. And for this family, says Carolyn, the lyrics stirred all-too-recent memories of a "devastating loss": Her mother’s first cousins — a "healthy and vibrant" couple in their 70s — died in the crash of Flight 990 en route to Cairo.

"I looked out at everybody’s faces" during that song, she says. "Everybody dissolved."

It’s possible, too, that the song was a reminder of another loss. Her sister Katy was killed in a car accident in 1983 at the age of 21.

Carolyn, who was 19 at the time, remembers that Hope Scott gathered the clan at her estate, Ardrossan, after Katy’s death. She spoke firmly to Carolyn and her surviving sisters Eliza and Anita.

"You all be strong for your mother," she told them. "If it’s sad for you, imagine what she’s going through."

That combination of strength and empathy, brass and compassion, is something Carolyn deeply admired about Scott.

"She had her poop in a group, I like to say."

I’d say it runs in the family.

Carolyn Montgomery: In the Temple of the Honky Tonk — The Songs of Michael Ogborn, with Ogborn at the piano, presented by Todd Waddington Productions, Sat., Dec. 4, 8 p.m., Tavern on Camac, 243 S. Camac St. (between Locust and Spruce, 12th and 13th), 215-545-0900.

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