The Frederick News-Post, December 1, 2005

'Here Lies Dorothy Parker'
Musician conjures poet through song

By Dickson Mercer

While her stories and poems frequently romanticized a Janis Joplin-esque existence, Dorothy Parker died at age 73 in relative obscurity, long after achieving literary fame in the 1920s and '30s. It was 1965; she was in poor health — drinking heavily and surviving on little money.

Her estate was handed to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a man she admired but never met, intended to be transferred upon his death (which occurred one year later) to the NAACP.

While numerous groups have resurrected her work, Parker's ashes remained in a lawyer's desk for nearly 20 years and were eventually interred in northwest Baltimore, near  NAACP headquarters.

Fast forward to 2005: Catonsville, singer/songwriter Niki Lee, moved by the lauded writer, poet, playwright and arts critic, bought the rights to convert her poetry to song for a mere $400.

What originally took shape in a manic, week-long rush of inspiration has evolved into "Here Lies Dorothy Parker" — a theatrical fusion of poetry, folk, pop and fictious journal entry — which was recently showcased at Towson University.
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As I arrive during the first number, three students, peaking inside a cracked entrance to the Recital Hall waiting for an appropriate moment to enter. Squeezing by them, through the entrance, inside the hall, I'm met by silence — a dead pause. The audience looks stunned, enraptured, possibly unsure.

"You can clap whenever you want to,” Lee suggests coolly.  “I'm a junkie for it.”

Wielding an acoustic guitar, Lee — dressed in black, sporting short, white hair — stands beside an optimistic portrait of Parker which completes a truly minimalist set.

Appraising her performance it's hard, to say whether she plays Parker, herself, or a combination of both. She appears edgy, appropriately, high-strung and unabashedly eccentric. Indeed, she would tower over the 4-foot 2-inch Parker, yet, with her droll tone, manages to successfully emote the quintessential New Yorker — her petite frame, her sizable and sardonic personality.

To play Parker, it seems, requires caustic sensibilities modulated with well-bred and feminine pitch. Indecency beats civility. Poignancy levels her acidic diatribes. You're narcissistic and self-destructive yet honest and sharp. You combine topics of love, death and suicide and lace it all together with stark humor.

After all, Parker is the theater critic who declared, "She runs the gamut of emotions from
A to B," when reviewing Katharine Hepburn's stage performance in a 1934 Broadway play; or the book reviewer who wrote that "this is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.”

Other famous Parker quotations include "brevity is the soul of lingerie" and "if all the girls who attended the Yale prom were laid end to end, I wouldn't be a bit surprised.”

As it happens, Lee discovered Parker, as described on her Website, "on a gloomy Memorial Day weekend" about two years ago.

"I was sad, very sad," she writes. "And so, as sad, self-centered people are want to do, I went in search of someone else's life that was sadder and more self­centered than mine.”

Lee found what she needed at a local video store: "Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle" starring Jennifer Jason Leigh.

Parker's bio is somewhat sketchy.  She was born Dorothy Rothschild in 1893 at her family's summer home in West End, N.J. but grew up in New York. Her Scottish mother died in Parker's infancy. She disliked her Catholic convent school and strict father, a successful garment manufacturer.

In 1916, upon selling some poetry to Vogue, she landed an editorial position captioning fashion photos. She graduated to drama critic at Vanity Fair from 1917 to 1920, then to theater and book reviewer at The New Yorker from 1927 to 1933, prior to working independently.

"Enough Rope” a best-selling book of poems was released in 1927. Her cynical verse is tightly wrapped in elegant soliloquies — despite its inward nature and occasionally trite lashings at hum-drum existence — created resonant, witty, and insightful art.

"Death and Taxes" (1931) came next for Parker, followed by short-story collections, "Laments for living" (1930) and "After Such Pleasure" (1933).

Lee's fictional vignettes bring Parker's life into focus, illuminating the downward spiral from literary fame to her last years in New York. Spontaneous entries pull the viewer inside her creative psyche, inside broken relationships or Christmas Eve supper at the Algonquin Roundtable (capped by statements like "you can lead a whore to culture but you can't make her think") or musings on sexuality or hangovers "so extraordinary they should be in the Smithsonian under glass.”       

Actual quotations effectively capture Parker's loquaciousness: "If you want to know what God thinks of money,” Lee says, “just look at the people he actually gave it to." An entry from Dec. 19, 1925, for instance, which begins with complaints of playwriting ("no money, long hours, no recognition"), ends with something a bit more weighty, "I will not tolerate bigotry in any form.”

While most poems are set to music, Parker uses operatic inflections to add vibrancy to the reading of a comic selection like "Bohemia.” In "Well-Worn Story,” her spare instrumentation, similar to a bass line, emboldens the imagery: "His voice went slipping over me/ like terrible silver hands.”

On the other hand, in "Ballade of Unfortunate Mammals” along with other poems and songs, Parker's lyrics transition to a genre reminiscent of "folk-tinged pop" with surprising grace — as Lee's clean vocals splash and reverberate through the intimate setting.

Showcasing a medley of performance styles, she slaps her guitar strings while reciting "Resume” — "Razors pain you; Rivers are damp; Acids stain you; And drugs cause cramp. Guns aren't lawful; nooses give; Gas smells awful; You might as well live.”

Later, in similar fashion to "Well-Worn Story," Lee's captivating, slow-burn delivery of "Advice to the Little Peyton Girl” assists the story's imbedded intensity.

Unafraid to inhabit Parker's dark side, Lee is equally unfazed by her straight-forward, no-holds­barred demeanor — confessing a profanity-laced distaste for encores along with an enigmatic obsession for Green Day.

While I certainly can't match her reverence for the popular rock outfit, singing "Wake Me Up When September Ends" — backed by Ernie Beck, who plays stripped-down electric guitar — Parker's legacy and spirit suddenly feels at home in a decidedly modern expression of malcontent.