“V IS FOR VONDA”

By: Gerrie Lim

(As published in September 1998 issue ofBigO magazine)

It certainly isn't every day that a beautiful blonde runs into you and you mistake her for someone else. She crossed my line of sight in the summer of 1994, while I was browsing at my then-local bookstore, in Santa Monica, California. She looked me in the eye and smiled. She also looked vaguely familiar.

"Gerrie!" she exclaimed. "Uh, Katherine?" I replied (What can I say? I had just met a tall, vivacious blonde television actress named Katherine at a party and she had been on my mind).

"No, Vonda," she corrected me, losing nary a beat and still flashing a big smile.

Oops. One of those moments, when you wish a hole in the ground would open up and you could just jump in it.

Well, flash-cut to four years later. And a certain television show called Ally McBeal, nominated for a whopping 10 Emmys. Vonda, of course, is Vonda Shepard, who appears on the show as both lounge singer and Ally's subliminal conscience - her songs occur to mirror the thoughts and dilemmas of the klutzy lead character.

Remember that episode where Ally is arrested for a supermarket altercation, in which she has also inadvertently shoplifted spermicide? "What Have They Done To My Song, Ma?" is what Vonda sings, reprising the old Melanie Safka classic.

But what has time done to my memory? I've been recalling that afternoon of my social faux pas ever since the recent release of Songs From Ally McBeal, the television show's "soundtrack," which features Vonda singing mostly cover versions of classic songs plus several of her own drawn from her three solo albums. (All still available on her own label, Vesper Alley, and, plug, plug, you even can buy them on the Internet, at http://www.vesperalley.com)

I'm sure Vonda's forgotten that incident, because we were merely acquaintances, having met years ago when she was playing solo gigs at a now-defunct club called At My Place, in Santa Monica. We also met backstage at Jackson Browne concerts. (She'd toured as a backup/harmony singer with Browne, Rickie Lee Jones and Al Jarreau.)

But I haven't forgotten it. In the compelling way that pop culture fetishizes certain blondes, I had a Vonda fetish. (Just like the way my current girlfriend has a Brad Pitt fetish, I tell myself.) A combination of that voice, that hair, that look; strong yet subtle, with just enough of an edge.

As anyone who ever went to a Vonda Shepard concert in the early 90's will tell you, she had a way of sending shivers down your spine with her potent combo of soul-inflected songs, and her good looks certainly didn't hurt. Success had been elusive, though, since Warner/Reprise dropped her after her first two albums didn't sell. My best memory of the chat we had in that bookstore was of her need to soldier on. She told me she was trying to start out again, by recording a new album on her own label, which she was going to call Pretty Music.

Well, time does strange things. Pretty Music didn't happen, but Ally McBeal did. The song that opens the show is "Searchin' My Soul," a new version of an old one -- it actually first appeared six years earlier, on her second album called “The Radical Light.” As legend now has it, Vonda got the gig through her good friend, Michelle Pfeiffer, who happens to be married to David E. Kelley, the creator of Ally McBeal. Pfeiffer took her husband to a Vonda Shepard concert, he went ga-ga, and the rest is history.

But I prefer to think that she got the gig because she never gave up. Up till 1997, racks in most record stores didn't even have a name card for her CD's, but she kept playing small clubs to sometimes only a dozen people. Now, she's just finished a summer tour of U.S. theatres, where her audiences number in the thousands. Last month, she did the talk shows (David Letterman, Rosie O'Donnell, even Magic Johnson) and, by the time you read this, is getting ready to tape the new season of Ally McBeal. The soundtrack has gone platinum, and she's now signed to Sony's 550 Music (with a new solo album due next March).

What's the lesson in all this? For one thing, providence duly rewards all good people who don't give up. That's why Vonda was completely unfazed when I thought she was someone else. In a city as competitive as Los Angeles, she was used to being another vivacious blonde trying to build a career while occasionally being mistaken for someone else. I remember that she grinned broadly, shushed away my apology, and we chatted about several things. Shortly later, I went to see her play The Troubadour. She had no new record to promote but certainly played like she did, wearing a sexy backless halterneck and glowing like a star.

For me, it's partly what Ally McBeal represents. "It's all about men, women, money, marriages, kissing, sex, dancing babies, true romance and strange hallucinations," reads the print ad for the show. The strange hallucinations part is the one that resonates. But I couldn't say it any better than Vonda herself: "Ain't it funny how you're walking through life and it turns on a dime?" That's from her song, "The Wildest Times Of The World," featured on Ally McBeal but taken from her last solo album, the excellent and extremely underrated “It's Good, Eve.”

I'll remember that one, the next time someone vaguely familiar crosses my path.

- Gerrie Lim