Yesterday I found out that Norm Bobrow has six weeks to live.
It took a little while to hit me. Not only was I nursing a serious hangover when I found out, but Norm dying is like Santa Claus dying in that he was around every Christmas and I was never sure he was real in the first place. But I never helped Santa Claus with his aging computer, and Santa Claus never believed in me back.
I first met Norm when I was around fourteen. I wore gigantic pants and glitter makeup every day and I was going to be a rock star. Norm knew I was going to be a rock star. When I decided to get into journalism, Norm told my mother that he saw me as a TV news anchor. He came to see my high school plays. Once, in a letter, he told me I should be a cocktail waitress in a “classy joint,” because I am a classy lady. In retrospect, it’s kind of weird that he saw all this in me, as I think everyone else in my family sphere saw me as a little raggedy, loud and overweight.
Norm changes the subject now whenever I bring up the memoirs he was writing, called Sang with Louis Armstrong, Slept with Charlie Parker. Which is true. He sang onstage with Louis Armstrong, and he crashed with Charlie Parker, or the other way around. This is because Norm is a Big Deal.
Norm started out in New York, which you can tell really easily from his slight Brooklyn accent and how his feet tap like he’s listening to a good record all the time as he goes on long tirades introducing new life characters like he was introducing them at a cocktail party. He managed Broadway talent, most notably Pat Suzuki, who played one of the lead roles in Flower Drum Song. The biggest song to come out of that musical was “I Enjoy Being a Girl,” which she sang, and my mother used to sing to me when I was a kid, especially after dentists’ appointments (“and my teeth aren’t teeth but pearls”):
[youtube BqXBkC-u--k]
Norm later relocated to Seattle, where he worked as a journalist (he sent me an article he wrote in the 50’s about how what America needs is a woman for a president), a jazz promoter, a DJ, and a club owner. Articles on the history of jazz call him an “impresario.”
Norm was a friend of my grandmother’s husband Tom. He attached himself to my family pretty quickly, becoming a staple at holidays and even informal gatherings, and everyone accepted and embraced it except Norm himself. I think it never really occurred to him that we consider him family. He’d always discourage us from helping him with anything or picking him up from his apartment on the way to Thanksgiving or Christmas because he didn’t want to be a bother. But that’s what my family does. “We will stop and see him on our way home on Sunday,” said my grandmother in the email she sent out, telling us the news, “although he's not sure he wants to see us.”
In Seattle, he owned a club, I think called the Colony. He was briefly in a vocal group called the Signatures, which I didn’t find out until I searched the Internet for his name. He put on jazz shows every Sunday. He still went to jazz shows all the time once old age set in – once he ran into my high school principal at one.
The last time I saw Norm, it was at a Christmas Eve get-together at my aunt and uncle’s house in Seattle. My cousin Michael asked him if he “ever smoked grass, back in the day.” Without missing a beat or even an awkward flinch he said that only jazz musicians did that back in the day, and we talked about radio. He liked that my favorite band at the time was the Supremes. For his long autobiographical rants he went on, he really didn’t like to talk about himself.
I want to write more about Norm. But this is long already. I want to visit him and bring a tape recorder. But I don’t know if he’d be embarrassed.
This is one of the pictures I could find in a pinch - it's from a local singer's (I think) website, and the caption is "Maia and Northwest jazz legend Norm Bobrow."
