Letter From the Big City
You’ve seen them go, those artists who have grown restless on the stages of our town and feel the need to test themselves in the Big City. They pack off to Los Angeles or Chicago or New York, and you never hear from them again. You’re left to wonder how they’re faring in the Big Time, where most artists log the majority of their performance time reciting specials du jour.
Well, there’s at least one Austin art expatriate about whom you can spend a little less time wondering. Sterling Price-McKinney has just written home to tell us how he’s surviving in the City That Never Sleeps. Price-McKinney, the gifted composer-performer behind the musicals The Late 20th-Century Love Affair, The Electric Street, and First Act Texas, Second Act New York, also known as the piano-playing half of the delightful (and sadly missed) cabaret team Cafe Manhattan (the other half being grand actress-chanteuse Karen Kuykendall), has taken the New York plunge to try his hand at the cabaret game there. And — wonder of wonders — he’s attracting a little attention.
Price-McKinney writes that he’s been doing lots of “piano bar work” at such NYC nightspots as The Oaks, Brandy’s, and The Broadway Grill, but his most regular gig has been at the club Eighty-Eights (228 W. 10th), where he performs a revue of his original songs titled All You’re Getting Is Me (a line from his number “The Fat Lady Is Sick Today”). Following a happy-hour run of it last summer, the show earned a gushy review from writer Andrew Martin in a city publication covering the cabaret beat. After characterizing our man Sterling as “one part Marvin Hamlisch, one part Barry Manilow, and one part Jacques Brel, with a charming Southern accent and a dash of Mike Todd-like showmanship,” Martin further praised him as a “top-notch” pianist and a songwriter whose works “are sure to emerge and endure within the cabaret arena as both purposeful and powerful for Price-McKinney and indeed any other entertainer who wishes to partake of the glorious cornucopia created by this gentleman.”
The Austinite admits to being grateful for the praise, but he reports that even more gratifying is the way other performers are discovering his songs and adding them to their repertoires. In New York, singer Denise Rosen covers Price-McKinney’s “Do Something to Me,” while Eric Comstock sings “The Fat Lady Is Sick Today” and “Where Will I Find My Heart?” In Boston, another singer uses three of the writer’s songs, and a Washington, D.C. performer uses yet another. As the artist himself writes, “I like the fact that it’s finally going past just me, wailing like the proverbial voice in the desert.” It ain’t fame and fortune (yet), but it’s a start. See, some people do write when they get work.
An Austin Van Gogh-Go
If you’re looking for the next Vincent Van Gogh, you might try T.A. Brown Elementary here in Austin. That’s where Cesar Pena goes to school, and this fifth grader is one of eight finalists in a national art contest sponsored by Andersen Consulting. The contest, held in conjunction with the Van Gogh’s Van Goghs exhibit at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., asked students to submit drawings or paintings depicting the classroom of the future. Pena did, and his efforts have won him and his parents a free trip to D.C. to see the Van Gogh show and attend a black-tie dinner hosted by Andersen Consulting where he’ll be given a $1,000 savings bond. His school benefits, too, receiving $5,000 for technological upgrades. You Van Gogh, boy!
This article appears in November 27 • 1998 and November 27 • 1998 (Cover).