Last year I bumped into an old elementary school classmate on the bus. I had seen her only once since 6th grade, in high school, when she came to a recital a friend of hers and I were in. Anyway, she told me she was a cabaret singer specializing in songs of the 20s and 30s. Although she was awfully mean to me in 6th grade, she was perfectly nice to me when we met in high school, and downright effusive when we met on the bus. So I looked up her website, listened to samples, and ended up buying all three of her CDs. I really like them. I like her invocation of her Ziegfeld's Follies grandmother (I've had a weakness for vaudeville ever since watching a great deal of Charlie Chaplin and reading Angela Carter — Wise Children and Nights at the Circus — in high school, and it all came back to me last week when I read Philip Pullman's magisterial Shadow in the North. There's a song by Jan Johansson that perfectly captures one aspect of vaudeville: the self-deprecating, shabby yet spiffy, humorous, good-natured mournfulness. It's called "Det sjunger nagontig inom mig," and it's in the Spelar Musik Pa Sitt Eget Vis. (There are circles over some of those a's.)) Anyway, back to Maude Maggart: at first all I could do was listen to her rendition of Cole Porter's "Looking at You" again and again. Now I've been able to tear myself away from it long enough to appreciate (on the same Look for the Silver Lining album) "I'll See You Again," "J'ai Deux Amours," "Look for the Silver Lining," and "My Man," and on the With Sweet Despair album, "Beyond Compare," "Remember My Forgotten Man" (I love the haunted bitterness, the stomping fierceness & the grace of it), and "Happy Days Are Here Again." It's hard to believe, listening to her calm, melancholy performance that this was FDR's campaign song.