Concerts

One wonderful recent performance was the "living room concert" I mentioned in the last post - the woman who organizes these concerts collects talented local musicians, picks two of them whose creative styles match, adds a poet into the mix, and hosts the whole thing in a living room. You have to reply ahead of time that you're coming, then she gives you the address where the event is taking place. So you get great music and the feeling of being in a wonderful secret!

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Then, I finally made it back to the open mic at a bar called Zimmer 16. I remembered this open mic as having impressive performers and a great atmosphere, but once I dragged friends along there, I started worrying I'd remembered wrong... Luckily, I'd remembered right.

There was the event organizer, who sang a delightful song about being neurotic; the woman who performed with a giant stuffed penguin next to her; a man whose singing voice reminded me of someone famous I couldn't quite place.

Then, there was Günther.

Günther was a lanky, beaky-nosed man in a tailcoat. He sat down at the piano and began singing in full-blown operatic style, but with lyrics that were about... high school reunions. And the hole in the ozone layer. And how walking in the woods can be dangerous if you don't select the proper type of walking stick.

At one point, he sang – operatically – that he would like two women from the audience to join him onstage. There's no way he could possibly have seen into the audience past the bright stage lights, but I swear, he was staring right at my friend and me, in the very last row. As Günther kept singing "I'd like two women to join me onstage" and "I'm going to stand here and wait until two women join me onstage," my friend and I tried valiantly to disappear – the two guys also with us laughed when they turned around and saw the two of us sinking lower and lower in our seats.

In the end, no women joined Günther onstage, and he completed the performance on his own.

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Then, a friend of mine who's been a Berliner for many decades invited me to see the musical "Linie 1," named for Berlin's subway line 1, which runs east-west across what was once West Berlin.

The musical is a classic, written in the 1980's, when the Berlin Wall was still standing, and has played in the same theater ever since. Lots of colorful characters and insightful songs about city life and about Berlin in particular, during the period when West Berlin was an island in the middle of East Germany:

"Berlin,
The only city in the world
Where every direction is east,
So the sun never goes down,
But only ever comes up."