THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, June 17, 1996 TAG: 9606170132
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: GUY FRIDDELL
LENGTH: 54 lines
The mission Saturday, surely not impossible, was to buy a cake holder to replace one that dematerialized or something after the cake was gone. To find it took visits to four stores and nearly a day.
In each, it had to be described: a platter the size of an old phonograph record with a groove around the rim on which you fitted, over the cake, a cover.
``Oh,'' said the first of several pleasant clerks, ``you mean a cake dome! We don't have one.''
The second clerk exclaimed, ``Cake dome? What you're seeking is a cake safe; we're out of 'em!''
What kept me moving was the memory of a colleague's smile when she gave me the cake.
That, and on the radio Ella Fitzgerald scat-singing ``Lady Be Good'' along the top of the scale - a mockingbird intoxicated with wild cherries filling a moonlit night with song. WFOS-FM 88.7 was playing her records in a three-hour tribute.
Word that day that Ella had died didn't end her song. It'll keep echoing. I drank it in between stops, listening, even before going in the store, to half a dozen numbers, then dashing inside on the bootless quest for the cake safe, bolting out the wrong door and jogging halfway around the mall to rejoin her.
``Cake safe?'' said the third clerk. ``Don't you mean a cake server?''
Back outside, I was on the run to Ella and found her singing, ``I saw you there, one wonderful day / You took my heart and threw it away / What is this thing called love?''
What range she had, soaring, the lilting notes becoming silken thin, a little girl's voice, then the precipitate drop of a roller coaster to deep in her chest, nearly guttural.
``Cake topper, it is. Over there.''
So it was, at last.
She never got in the way of the music. The song was all. It could be singing itself. You are aware with Sinatra of the dramatics. More and more he acts, talks it out, snapping fingers, stamping, whip-cracking words - a kinetic exhibit.
On the radio she was singing Cole Porter's ``Anything Goes,'' each line containing several rhymes that she delivered clearly, pure as petals, yet blending them in the melody.
Even Louis Armstrong overwhelmed the song now and then, hamming it a bit on show stoppers. But never Ella. She respected the music, as if her voice were a clarinet, a violin, part of the ensemble.
Even in the long, stagey, preamble of the musical show numbers, her voice enchants us, holds us as she skips nimbly, rock to rock, child-like across the creek, each step a sure, endearing note to gain the musical shore.
Through six decades, from when at 16 she won $10 in a Harlem amateur hour, Ella was within the song and will be within us hereafter, a lovely, flowing, ever-fresh skein of music.
What a sweet day it had been! by CNB