The Afternoon Mademoiselle Walked By, New York 1957 📚 Elegant Piano Jazz for Reading | The Reading

The Afternoon Mademoiselle Walked By, New York 1957 📚 Elegant Piano Jazz for Reading | The Reading    • The Afternoon Mademoiselle Walked By, New ...   Late September, 1957. You're reading in the lobby of a grand hotel on Park Avenue when the elevator doors open and a small, straight-backed woman in a straw sailor hat walks out, ropes of pearls, a bellboy behind her with suitcases and, oddly, a cowboy hat perched on top. Coco Chanel is checking out. 📚✨ French-tinged piano jazz for reading. She is seventy-four. She has just come back from Dallas, where she was named the most important designer of the past fifty years. She confessed she'd been terrified before the ceremony, until the Texans turned out to be warm, simple and kind. The cowboy shirts and hats in her luggage are presents for friends in Paris. Up close, she wears almost nothing: a plain silk suit, a white blouse, gold cufflinks that Stravinsky gave her thirty years ago. But the jewel she loves most is the smallest one, a topaz ring on her little finger. An old woman in Auvergne gave it to her when she was sixteen and told her never to take it off, because her life would be magnificent. She says she would trade every other jewel she owns for it. Three years ago she came back to fashion after fifteen silent years. Paris critics called her finished. She smiled and thought: I will show them. America applauded first. She isn't interested in 1957 anymore. Only in what comes next. The revolving door turns, Park Avenue flashes gold, and she is gone. You look back down at your page and realize you've been reading the same line for five minutes. What would you have said, if she'd stopped at your chair? 🗽 The Reading Room is a quiet corner of 1950s New York: one real week, one year, one scene, and music to read by. 📖 On the desk that week "West Side Story" had opened on Broadway just two days earlier John Osborne's "Look Back in Anger" was arriving from London Louis Armstrong's new musical autobiography on record, the most talked-about jazz album of the season #readingmusic #jazzforreading #1950snewyork