WEBVTT

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[APPLAUSE]

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OK.

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Much, much better.

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Now we bring the
mic up a little.

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How's that?

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Better?

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Yes.

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OK.

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The back, you all right?

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If you can't hear me, wave at
me, OK, and I will get louder.

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Is it too loud?

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Is it echoey?

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No.

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It's not.

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OK.

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All right, so you've now
met George, you met Pam,

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now you're going to meet Brian.

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Upstairs neighbor, "Brian."

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"Mornings, he dipped
down five flights

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dressed for an office
vanished 30 years ago.

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Fedora, houndstooth jacket,
seething fumes, alcohol,

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burnished by archaic
smokes, Tareytons, Pall

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Malls, something I didn't
think they made anymore.

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He still auditioned, never
got a part, got by on what?

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Circumspect?

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Only a little confiding
now, and then,

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a girlish flash of camp when
he figured no one overheard.

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A little gossip, the neighbor
is the dragon lady downstairs

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who terrified him.

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Then heigh-ho, a bit of
whistle tune, and he'd be off.

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Returning early evening,
he'd sit on the stairs.

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Going either way, he'd say--

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and if I passed him going
either way, he'd say,

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I'm waiting for my
breath to come back

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from wherever it's gone.

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I saw his exhalation in
the form of a shadow,

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a phantom silhouette
from some old movie

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slipped down the stairs
in search of a city

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no longer in evidence.

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So the shadow came
home always, and Brian

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would resume his climb, cough
echoing down to my apartment

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door, climb to his
two fifth-floor rooms

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to distillates the same
amber as his clothes,

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and the solace of
memory breathed out

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onto disks of black
vinyl, hundreds of them,

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his record collection, the
Skylark trills of Artie Shaw,

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the wry and wounded Eros of
Lady Day, his balm, and oxygen."

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