Free Take the Cannoli by Sarah Vowell

and, of course, “Saturday Night (Is the Loneliest Night of the Week).” Who says happiness never comes cheap? A jukebox stocked with Sinatra can turn your world around.
    I ask Leo if the woman standing next to Frank in the photograph over the bar is Dolly, Sinatra’s locally infamous mother. Leo responds, “That’s my wife.” (Obviously, years of listening to Sinatra haven’t made me any more suave.) I ask him what his favorite song is and put it on the jukebox as an apology. It’s “Summer Wind,” a song I’ve heard a thousand times, which does not mean that I ever paid attention. You can live with a tune for years and it never seeps in; it just lingers, waiting to be noticed. Normally, I prefer the Frank extremes—either vainglorious or defeated, the macho thrill of “Come Dance with Me” or that rock-bottom classic “When No One Cares.”
    â€œSummer Wind” is an in-between song. It’s relaxed, seductive. The arrangement is perfect, the voice sexy and dear. Frank’s old pal Leo, who has been married for fifty-nine years, sways ever so slightly to its pretty pulse, occasionally mouthing the words. Watching him, watching what looks to be a picture of contentment, makes you wonder about the man Frank Sinatra might have been if he had never crossed the river, if he had never sung this song. Maybe he would still be married to the mother of his children. Maybe he would be as blissful as this hardworking Leo appears to be, though where would that leaveLeo, not to mention the rest of us? We would all be doomed to waste away in one stifling Margaritaville after another with no sweet, blue breeze on our skin. Leo says, “I go upstairs, and I go to sleep, and I dream Sinatra.”
    If you were born Somebody, you might expect that. You might expect starring roles in other people’s dreams. If you were born Somewhere, hubris would come easy. But if you are Nowhere’s child, hubris is an import, pride a thing you decide to acquire. That’s what all the punks know. That’s why a cocksure Patti Smith could cover “So You Want to Be a Rock ’n’ Roll Star” and sound as if she wrote the song herself. That’s why the then completely unknown Corin Tucker of Sleater-Kinney could sing “I’m the queen of rock and roll” and make you believe her. And it’s why you buy the chutzpah of Hoboken’s Frank Sinatra when he sings a silly song like “New York, New York” and tells you he’ll be “top of the heap.” One thing punk—and Sinatra especially—never does is take that kind of self-confidence for granted. Because anyone who comes from Nowhere knows how easy it would be to go right back.

Chelsea Girl
    T HERE ARE TWO S TATUES OF Liberty in New York—the one for immigrants out on Liberty Island, and the one for weirdos at 222 West Twenty-third Street. One might imagine that the marker tacked onto the Chelsea Hotel’s Victorian facade proclaims, “Give me your junkies, your geniuses, your men in eye makeup, yearning to lay low.” But the real sign lacks any Emma Lazarus pizzazz. It straightforwardly announces that the historic landmark “opened in 1884 as one of the city’s earliest cooperative apartment houses,” became a hotel in 1905, and has been the refuge of the relatively respectable literary lights O. Henry, Dylan Thomas, and Thomas Wolfe. (What? You were expecting they’d advertise Sid Vicious?)
    The list of Chelsea residents past is so impressive as to appear fictitious. Mark Twain slept here. Arthur C. Clarke wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey here. Robert Mapplethorpe showed up with his lover Patti Smith, way back in the days when Robert Mapplethorpe would havehad a lover named Patti. Teen movie actress Gaby Hoffmann of Sleepless in Seattle semifame spent her childhood here with her mother, Viva, the Warhol Superstar. American folk chronicler and