The Stairwell Crooner

He loved to sing. As a younger man he'd tried the club circuit, but that had been a no-go. Perhaps he'd been too shy to perform in front of crowds. Now, he sang in stairwells: great acoustics! Arias, pop songs, show tunes...Nobody ever saw him. He was always A flight below, or above, But his voice throbbed through the entire stair vestibule of a building— stirring, thick, authentic. Closing your eyes, you could easily imagine yourself at Carnegie Hall. After some years, during which he became a kind of legend, he disappeared. No one ever knew if he'd died, or moved, or retired. But hundreds of souls downtown had been touched by the Stairwell Crooner, and never ducked into a vestibule to walk a few flights in leiu of a slow elevator, without remembering him, and hearing again his liquid voice in their minds.