Bicoastal: Bobby Darin at the Copa

                                            for my fathers

In the summer of my sixteenth year, my stepfather
got a pulpit in Beverly Hills he would have loved
to have been permanent:  Rabbi to the stars.
We rented a furnished pad on Sunset Strip
where many an afternoon it was the singer Jack
Jones and me alone at the pool,
only Jack’s deck chair was surrounded
by an entourage: agents, managers, vocal coaches,
toupees, gold chains, Hawaiian shirts,
who yakked and gesticulated with cigars as batons
about his current gig at the Coconut Grove,
analyzing his previous night’s performance
for what should be kept, what dropped;
and I thought what a good singer he was—

(“though not as good,” both the fathers agreed,
“as his father, Allan Jones, the tenor”)—
but that onstage he lacked the personal touch
of Bobby Darin at the Copa when he stepped down
and mingled among the audience and sang “Dream
Lover” to a golden-haired little girl
who would have been in kindergarten,
and asked in a tender and intimate voice
“How old are you darlin’?”
and “Is the room too smoky for you?” 
My father’d consented to take me to see
Darin at the Copa, because he’d read that the kid
could really sing unlike the others
he considered goons with pompadours
who depended on echo chambers and tricks.

From The Couple   (Wesleyan University Press, 2002).