Elizabeth Soychak: Press

West Side Story Amid the Laundry
by Penelope Green
for New York Times

JUST after 9 p.m. on June 17, the third installment of the High Line Park Renegade Cabaret was held on Patty Heffley’s fourth-floor fire escape. There were colored lanterns, and a festive array of undergarments hung from the railings.

Ms. Heffley, 55, a former punk rock photographer, had staged a laundry “installation,” as she put it, to bolster the live performance she was hosting. Elizabeth Soychak, a jazz singer and professional organizer who gives her age as “permanently 39,” wore a 1950s moss green chiffon dress and waited while Ms. Heffley, in black, introduced her.

“This is in response to 31 years of obscurity,” Ms. Heffley announced from the fire escape. “Now, every day there are thousands of people looking in my window. We’re not here to celebrate, we’re here to exploit. Welcome to the Renegade Cabaret.” Then Ms. Soychak launched into an a cappella rendition of Johnny Mercer’s “Early Autumn.”

Location, as all New Yorkers know, is destiny, and Ms. Heffley is embracing hers with gusto.

Since 1978, she has been living in a West 20th Street loft, yards away from the elevated track-turned-park-and-public-works-darling known as the High Line. Though the High Line extends from Gansevoort Street north to West 34th, it has been planted and paved only as far north as 20th Street; a gate there bars people from walking farther, and visitors bottleneck at that point.

Furthermore, though the ambient lighting of the path was designed by the High Line’s architects, Diller, Scofidio & Renfro, to glow mistily from the meadow beds on either side of the walkway, the lights planted on top of the stairway exit were installed by contractors who happened to point the harsh white beams right at Ms. Heffley’s windows.

Like it or not, Ms. Heffley’s living room has become a stage, and her fire escape — her front porch — its proscenium arch.

MS. HEFFLEY, now a freelance multimedia consultant, moved to New York from Denver 31 years ago, eager to photograph Manhattan’s punk scene. She chose her apartment (rent, $360, now $841) because it was a place where she could make a lot of noise.

The High Line was an agreeable presence. At first, a single locomotive rumbled by once or twice a week, but that eventually stopped. Then weeds began to grow. Ms. Heffley always wanted to plant flowers, but never found a way. “I tried filling a water balloon with seeds,” she said. “But it’s farther than you think.”

Days before the park’s opening on June 9, Ms. Heffley called her friend Ms. Soychak and said: “I’ve got to do something. Can you sing a few songs?”

Opening night was magical, both agreed. Ms. Soychak performed two three-song “micro sets,” as she called them, to a warmly appreciative audience. By laundry day, however, Ms. Heffley was panicking. Her loft has a washing machine, but no dryer; for three decades, she’s used the fire escape.

“I realized I can’t go out in my get-up,” Ms. Heffley said, pulling out her typical laundry day attire: orange gingham boxers and a fuchsia nightie. “So I put on a red tutu, a red hoodie and sunglasses. I proceeded to put my laundry out as usual, but with the underwear at the back.”

Soon, she was staging the laundry: drying the real stuff late at night, and by day, hanging goofier items like ruffled panties and leopard prints. One day someone called to her from the path, “I hope you don’t lose your energy for the laundry.”

Ms. Heffley was uplifted by the encouragement. “I’ll be putting other kinds of stuff out there, too. I have lots of ideas.” The Cabaret now has a Facebook page, and a Web site is under construction.

AT last week’s performance, David Hausen and Rocky Ziegler, filmmakers out for an evening stroll, listened happily from a park bench. Mr. Hausen asked, “Do they take requests?”

Nearby, a man in a khaki vest was singing along. “I know what time it is now,” he warbled as Ms. Soychak performed a Rodgers and Hart classic.

At 10 p.m., closing time for the park and the cabaret, Ms. Heffley and Ms. Soychak bid the audience goodnight. “If you see the party patio lanterns lit,” Ms. Heffley told them, “you’ll know something is going to go on when it gets dark.”

Robert Hammond, a founder of the Friends of the High Line and a member of the audience, remarked, “This is what we wanted,” referring to the cabaret. “It is going to keep it wild more than that will,” he continued, pointing to a patch of wildflowers.

As for the lights that shine like kliegs into Ms. Heffley’s windows, he said ruefully, “We screwed up on those.” But he brightened when told that she had said they were good for a stage. The Renegade Cabaret, he said, “is born of a mistake, just like the park.”

Now, this Renegade Cabaret would be thrilling enough just for the unexpected wonder of a woman in a green dress filling the night air with song. But the inventiveness and audacity of the thing is matched (if not surpassed) by the incredible instrument that is Ms. Soychak's voice.

On a recent Saturday night, she filled the night air with a surprising array of Jazz standards. A standout was The Midnight Sun, perhaps best known for the clear-toned version of Ella Fitzgerald. The Midnight Sun (music by Lionel Hampton & Sonny Burke, Lyric by Johnny Mercer) is no simple tune to pull off for even the most accomplished Jazz vocalist. To convey this song without accompaniment, as Ms. Soychak does with everything she sings on that fire escape, would be considered performers-suicide by some. So rich and unexpected are the harmonies underlying the melody, it's hard to believe that somehow, through her crystal clear tone, her pitch-perfect delivery of even the smallest grace note, Ms. Soychak manages somehow miraculously, to convey these underlying harmonies, although they are not there. We are only literally hearing her solo voice sing a melody. She is not a piano. She cannot achieve true polyphony, i.e. she cannot strike two notes or more at once to achieve a chord. And yet, somehow, in her performance, she is so clearly in tune with the underlying harmonic progressions, that they are effortlessly conveyed -- start to finish.

There's no simple way to say this except: she is a master. And she's performing on a fire escape for free.

After June 9th I researched the Renegade Cabaret in hopes that Heffley would still host future performances for Soychak on her balcony. I came across all sorts of online viral groups and made it to the performance held last Thursday.

There are many things to be said about the Renegade Cabaret performances. They’re casual, humorous, free, and really for the people of the Highline to enjoy. While the sound system isn’t the best, Soychak sings effortlessly despite the fact that hundreds of strangers are watching her and she has no backing band. She keeps the tunes short so that they don’t begin to sound stagnant while Heffley gives mini monologues between songs that make everyone laugh, and break up what would otherwise be the monotony of straight a capella. I hope to see the Renegade Cabaret become a favorite past time of Highline lovers and New Yorkers!

I stopped on my way home to the Renegade Cabaret on the High Line at W. 20th Street and 10th Ave. As you may know from yesterday's Will Clark World blog and also the New York Times article, Elizabeth performs old style cabaret songs twice a week from a fire escape. This is a picture that I took from their website www.renegadecabaret.com which you can check out and find out more about the show (which is, like all the best things, free although you would do well to leave your business card and cash in the bucket that they lower from the fourth floor landing. The show is fun, sentimental and did I mention, free (and naturally all this would be moot if Elizabeth didn't have a fantastic voice, which she does). The next show is tonight from 9pm to 10pm.

"Judging from her picture on the cover of BEHAVE YOURSELF, Elizabeth Soychak is a young woman, but her singing is mature beyond her years. She has a pure quality to her voice and she sings these songs with more understanding than a young singer usually does. Listen to the way she drifts through "September Song" and "Close Enough For Love," the kind of songs that normally only work in veteran hands. She also gets vibrant and haunting when dancing through uptempo songs like "Behave Yourself" and "Star Eyes." Even Billy Strayhorn's imperishable art song, "Lushlife," gets a memorable reading, full of youthful energy and worldly regret at the same time. Her musical accompaniment forms a delicate but strong backdrop to her singing. Elizabeth Soychak seems a very promising singer, the kind that might really flower on a big label under the current vocalist boom."