Customer Reviews

Dreamtime Alice - A Memoir

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Very much like the two men who looked out from prison bars, one seeing mud and the other seeing stars, Mandy Sayer saw more rainbows than rain when eking out a precarious living tap dancing with her jazz drummer father, Gerry, on the streets of New York City and New Orleans. In a powerful, boldly provocative memoir, Dreamtime Alice, she reveals that her rosy- hued vision was airbrushed by a hunger to share in the life of her alcoholic father, an Irish charmer, a raconteur par excellence who looked to her to draw an audience and looked the other way when his friends sought her sexual favor.

Dreaming of their future, she wrote, "It was in New York... that we would be successful... It was there that we would have lots of glorious fun and return home with bags of money. There that we would live out the long, warm nights that would later fill the repertoire of my father's stories, a repertoire of which I had longed to be a part."

Ms. Sayer, who has been named among "10 Best Young Australian Novelists" has woven a rich tapestry of her recollections - the surface is brilliantly colored, a sometimes coke induced kaleidoscope of aspirations and full money buckets while the seamy underside reveals a busker's gritty existence. Familiar streets and those who earn their living on them will not look the same to us again after having seen them through Ms. Sayer's eyes.

In 1983 the father/daughter act, he 63, she 20, left Australia with little more than their costumes. Rather than the mecca of her imagination, glinting "like a thousand Chrysler buildings," New York City was a tract of unyielding pavement which taught her how to cope - with the police (including a lecherous officer who offered protection for a price), with rival entertainers, with complaining businesses, and with capricious weather.

She met Romano, a handsome street magician, then Bruno and Grimaldi: "Drawn to characters who lived just beneath the surface of convention." When winter threatened, the pair fled to New Orleans and a pink courtyard room behind a witchcraft shop, where Ms. Sayer, an avowed believer in the supernatural, uncomplainingly settled in.

Bourbon Street proved even less hospitable than the Fifth Avenue entrance to Central Park, officially limiting their work evening to a two hour stint so as not to compete with indoor nightclub entertainment. Their small nest egg dwindled. Gerry, concerned that he would be deported, found an American wife in a local bar. Although he was not divorced from Mandy's mother, he married in order to obtain a green card.

Throughout the dank chill of Louisiana's winter the pair subsisted on raw vegetables and avocados. Then, with hope again high, they returned to New York City. But there was no reprise. She soon fell ill and was trundled off to an emergency room not by Gerry but by a neighbor. After recovering from an almost fatal disorder she walked alone from Bellevue Hospital, "I fixed my eyes on the horizon," she writes, "....numb with the realization that I had lost faith in my beautiful, difficult father."

Ms. Sayer does not reflect with bitterness but rather with grace, humor and understanding, describing their 18 month odyssey as having "made me grow in directions I could never have anticipated... For I started off wanting to become a character in my father's story, now he's a character in mine."

And what a remarkable story she gas given us - more than a vivid recollection of life on the edge this is a meritorious coming-of-age tale, radiant yet unsparing. Ms. Sayer's enchanting mix of pluck and naivete will win hearts; her haunting, lyrical way with words will garner plaudits. Dreamtime Alice is her triumph.

As the author of the authoritative how-to book on street performing (Be a Street Magician!: A How-To Guide), I can tell you that this girl has been there. The book's authenticity bleeds through on every page--the street characters, the money obsession, the work ethic, the vulnerability to all the world's scammers. If you want to know how it is to play the street for a living, it's all here.
But this is more than just a book about the street. In a strange way, it's a chick book in that it explores with earnestness and innocence the yearning of a 20-year-old girl for her good-for-nothing father. But it's more than that, too, because chicks may find the grittiness, sleaze, and violence to be a bit more than Kate Chopin usually offers.
One good sign: Some nights, I found myself involuntarily staying up reading this book until 1 or--God forbid!--2 am. I just couldn't stop reading! Parts of the book dragged, but then, why couldn't I put it down? I can't tell you except to say that the narrative held me.
I know street performers who played New York City during the early '80s and knew Mandy, and they talk favorably about her (if you're reading this, Mandy, they'd like to contact you!).
At times, I wondered whether the narrator fully realized her emotional attachment to her father, and I still wonder. But the book built to a triumphant emotional ending that I didn't expect. It's not the kind of Hollywood ending that we like to expect not to expect, but instead, a triumph of the soul. I learned something about maturing innocence and the growth of the personality.
The book doesn't move like a novel, for this is the recollection of real life. Action doesn't proceed as mathematically as it does in a Le Carre or Grafton book; instead, it proceeds in stalls and jerks. But that's why we love memoirs, isn't it? To breathe in the whiff of what reallly happened. To utter "Wow, she lived through it." Not to pretend, but to know what's true.
Give the book a read. You'll learn something about the street and, at the same time, streets of passage.

Reading all the other rave reviews, I'm left wondering what I missed. For me, this book totally failed to engage me or even make me care about Mandy and what happened to her. I found her treatment shallow and the whole tale somehow lacked real substance. It just never came alive for me. It seemed there could have been so much more yet all we got was surface descriptions.

While this book was very well written, I found the main characters rather unlikeable and the story itself boring.

As a tap dancer and as someone who loves both New York and New Orleans, I really wanted to like this book. It just left me cold. Maybe it was that her obsessive search for an orgasm was such a lame metaphor. Maybe it was her complete self-absorption. Maybe it was the fact that her father seemed to be a much, much more interesting character than she was, and yet he wasn't given nearly as much play. While it definitely has its moments, this book is ultimately a disappointment. And when she finally HAS an orgasm, my guess is most readers will say "so what?"

If you've ever wondered "Who IS this person? Why are they here?" while watching a street performer, this book might satisfy your curiosity. I enjoyed the descriptions of life in the "underworld" of New York and New Orleans.

Her name isn't even Alice and although the title implies a life of fantasy this is anything but! From an oddly close relationship with her estranged father to her search for an orgasm, this book stops along the road of life to examine street performers in both New York and New Orleans.

The poverty is abject, the obsession to tap dance compulsive yet there is a charm and adventure to this memoir that would entice anyone to go along for the ride. The colorful cast of characters are real people with personalities that often fit classic stereotypes. This book makes one realize how one can become trapped in a lifestyle joined as a lark by lack of money to get out. I look forward to a sequel to find out when Alice became Mandy and how her life changed dramatically.

The first thing that comes to mind when asked about this book is how much i really know, I could never have imagined that people busk on purpose, because they wan't to, very eye opening. Wonderful desciptions I felt as though I was there, I totally enjoyed reading Gerry's stories, totally jumped out at me.

What an amazing adventure for Alice. I really enjoyed this true life story of Mandy's early life entertaining on the streets of New York and New Orleans. I had a hard time understanding her father's reasons for treating Mandy in such a peculiar fashion. I did however, understand Mandy's thirst for her father's approval and love. The life style of these two vagabonds in one you will enjoy reading