Free The Copa by Mickey Podell-Raber Page A

how to perform yet; it takes about nine to ten years before you can become a consummate performer and learn how to adapt to the audience. That’s what regretful about today’s kids in the business, they don’t have the time or places to hone their crafts like my generation had years ago.
    For my annual engagements at the Copa I would have new orchestrations written by people like Neal Hefti, Don Costa, Marion Evans, and Torrie Zito. I tried to do the material I had just recorded or was about to record. I remember doing an engagement at the Copa in early 1958 that featured famous musicians Herbie Mann, Candido, and Sabu because we had just recorded the album The Beat of My Heart and I wanted to feature some of that material in the show. Once I established myself, I played the Copacabana regularly for almost twenty years. The Copa would book me a lot for prom season—that was one of the busiest times of the year for them. It was great because my shows all got wonderful reviews and whatever entertainers were in New York at the time would stop by to catch our show. I always made it a point to introduce the visiting celebrities to the audience sometime during the show.
    The house band at the Copa was always good, but like other acts, I’d bring along key members of my group and usually had Ralph Sharon with me on the piano.
    The shows at the Copa were actually like revues—the Copa Girls would open the show and a comedian and then a headliner usually followed them. It was wild because you’d have to do two or three shows per night. If you did three shows you wouldn’t get out until four in the morning and you’d be numb.
    Besides other fellow entertainers who would come by and seethe show, the audience seemed to be made up of Jewish and Italian mobsters on the weekends.
    Then the whole era of nightclubs began to die—there were so many places to play, but in the late 1960s things began to change. Many of the clubs couldn’t compete with the salaries the casinos in Las Vegas were offering to entertainers. Times changedand people would be content to stay at home and be entertained by watching television. It was the end of an era. the Copa was glamorous.
    The Copa was very intimate; it was basically a saloon. Frank Sinatra would say he and I were saloon singers. Clubs like the Copacabana were the greatest school for learning how to perform. It teaches you how to be very flexible since anything can happen. There can be all kinds of upsets: either someone is drunk and disrupts the whole audience, or a tray drops. All kinds of incongruous things can happen in a club because you are battling people who want to dance, who may have a business deal going…all kinds of interludes besides the actual performance going on. It takes about ten years to learn how to deal with these things because every night is different; you never know what’s going to happen, so you have to quickly adjust to what the scene is that evening.

    Me with a friend, Tony Bennett, and my cousin Natalie. Tony was also an audience favorite at the Copa. My father was a big fan of Tony’s from the beginning of his career.

    Me with Teddy Randazzo; I had a huge crush on him at the time. Teddy had some success as a singer but is mostly known today as being a very prolific songwriter.

    Comedian Buddy Hackett dances with me as my mother looks on. This was during one of the many Sunday nights that my mother and I would go to the club for dinner and to see the show.

    Buddy Hackett, my father, and Billy Martin with an unidentified couple at the club.

    Eydie Gorme’s opening night at the Copa in September 1965. Tennessee governor and Mrs. Frank Clement along with Gorme’s husband, Steve Lawrence, congratulate her after the show.

    Steve Lawrence, unidentified man, Eydie Gorme, and my father toast another successful engagement at the club.

    Joe Soldo, a musician who worked many of Bennett’s Copa engagements,