I just got off the phone with Jane. She’s an old friend, one of the Colgate crew that graduated from Colgate University in 1982. I fell in with that crowd while I was still living in Lodi. My job at that time was to drive twice a day from Saddle Brook NJ to 47th and Third Avenue in Manhattan. It was at 757 Third Avenue that I first met Rand and Jose, they had just graduated from Colgate so I guess that would make it 1982 as well. I remember walking down a hallway and seeing these two guys acting strangely, meaning they were acting just like me.
I found out that they lived in Hoboken, Jose had an apartment on Monroe Street when Monroe Street was real rough and tumble, Rand lived with his sister on Willow Avenue, not so rough and tumble. I asked them if they went to McSwells which is where I started to go a few months previously after my brother Frank had told me about it. Rand and Jose went there occasionally, definitely not as often as I did. Through Rand and Jose I met Lois and Martha who also went to Colgate and were sharing an apartment on Garden Street. They had a third roommate and that was Jane.
Jane was traveling through Europe I believe, and left her boyfriend Andy behind. Andy eventually moved in with Rand across the street from McSwells but I’m getting ahead of myself. Many nights were spent at the Garden Street apartment, getting jazzy, doing whippets and or nitrous oxide occasionally hitting the slopes. Not much drinking or sexing going on, just inebriation of the illegal kind. We were in our twenties which is pretty much a good time to do that sort of thing.
Everyone was always going on and on about how great Jane is, and what a great time we would have when she got back from Europe if anyone had an idea when she was coming back. Eventually she did come back, and I recall meeting her on 51st Street with Rand and or Jose and she was great though she paid more attention to the friends that she knew rather than the friend she was going to make. That’s certainly understandable. Eventually we hit it off. She was, and still is quite great. Jane is an excellent cello player by the way.
She eventually got a gig playing cello at brunch on Sunday afternoons at McSwells which was cool if you had a hangover from hanging out there the night before. Jane and I wrote a song together which we debuted at one of my first live appearances at a bar in Times Square called Tin Pan Alley. She titled the song O’Toole for some reason. I hadn’t heard from Jane in a while, in fact the last time I heard from her was on my birthday last year, she remembered and gave me a call.
Jane lives in Woodstock now, away from the hustle and bustle and the rough and tumble, a quiet life when she’s not on the road. She’s played with some fairly big names in the music business and toured with some of them. Just good to hear from an old friend. We made tentative plans to meet up next time she’s in Manhattan, country life is too boring for our Jane. It’s a nice life raft, a cabin in the woods, but I guess she’s just a metropolitan gal deep down. We can do a lot more catching up face to face rather than on a long phone call, though a phone is just as good if you can get together, face to face. And forget about being online, she has a dial up.
