It’s been a tough month for everyone, and the lawn decorations which you see all around town (skeletons, vampires, witches, graveyards, and all the rest) seem appropriate for reasons other than the original one.
In addition to all of the news out of the Middle East, six people that I have known have passed away in October – including two high school classmates, the mother of Hannah’s best high school friend, a member of my Thursday morning breakfast group and – only a few days ago – a long time member of the Board of Directors of the Jewish Funeral Practice Committee of Greater Washington, Inc, an organization of which for the last six years I have been the president. He died very unexpectedly of a presumed heart attack – I had spoken with him about a week before he died, and he was fine.

Thursday night, as Edie and I sat around watching still more depressing news on the MSNBC, I was scrolling through Facebook, and saw an ad pop up telling me that there was going to be a one-night only concert of Edith Piaf music at the Strathmore Music Center. “Maybe we should go?”, I asked, and got a answer that surprised me (since we haven’t gone to this type of event within recent memory): “Sure”. So, spur of the moment, I bought two tickets.

For those who have never been to Strathmore, it is located in North Bethesda on Rockville Pike, about six miles from our house. It’s a large facility, built years ago now (but I still consider it new) by Montgomery County MD, which was trying to provide an alternative to the downtown DC venues. The main auditorium, which has very good acoustics, seats about 2,000 (to be precise, 1976 – I wonder how they came up with that number).

Because a Piaf music concert was primarily just that – music – and because the acoustics would not be a problem (and because I am – as they say in older English novels – parsimonious), I bought the cheapest seats possible. Which of course does not mean that they were cheap. It just means the we were in the fourth and last row in the second balcony of the theater, truly the stratosphere. Of course there was no one behind us, and our row was relatively sparsely settled (I am not sure why, since the house generally looked pretty much filled), and I must say – we could not have had better seats.

Now Edith Piaf is someone we both identify with. Edie, for obvious reasons, and me, because Edith Piaf was known as the Little Sparrow, and my maternal grandmother’s maiden name was Wrobel, Polish for sparrow. OK, it’s a stretch, I know. But there you go.

We didn’t really know what to expect. I hadn’t looked at anything about the program. It turned out it was basically a one woman show, with four backup musicians – a piano, a base, a percussionist (drums, xylophone and more) and an accordionist. The singer and central figure on stage was a French vocalist named Nathalie Lermitte, and we had never heard of her (nor, I imagine, had any – or many – of you).

Lermitte is 10 years older than Piaf is when she died. The performance went on for about two hours (with an intermission), so was quite vocally demanding, and it was really wonderful. The backup musicians were just right (there was one terrific accordion solo), and Lermitte’s voice is very rich, very powerful, and – to my ear – pitch perfect. It’s a richer voice than Piaf’s was, and may lack a bit of Piaf’s drama, but so what? She was not an impersonator; she was a performer. And she performed perfectly.

All the well known Piaf songs were there, there were some historic visuals on a screen projected behind the stage, there was a tribute to Piaf’s one time boy friend, prize fighter Marcel Cerdan, who died in a commercial airplane crash in 1949 at a young age, and there was minimal dialogue – and virtually all of that in French.

The audience lapped it up. I am certain that it was filled with French speakers, and the crowd’s version of La Vie en Rose (with the original words projected on the screen) also seemed pretty much pitch perfect.

And Padam, Padam, Padam? Watch or listen to the Piaf version. Here is the URL: I hope it works. https://video.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?fr=yhs-trp-001&ei=UTF-8&hsimp=yhs-001&hspart=trp&p=edith+piaf+padam&type=Y143_F163_201897_123021#id=0&vid=b385fd7869f11bef94e1fcf3772c2f76&action=click

Now back to my regularly scheduled activities……