At Hugh’s Room there were two men seated directly before me, the front row, where I could not avoid them though in truth I did, blinded as I was by the lights that pressed into my eyes. They held up a sign, cardboard, dark letters, but indecipherable to me in that glare. I registered dimly in the first moments of the show, then I vanished into that zone where you become a vessel of your work, of sound, of words. Perhaps I thought they were waving some casual, Hello Bob, or some ironic cuteness. And so I ignored it. Only afterward, when the lights were down and the night was over, did they approach, earnest, insistent, holding up their sign again, this time legible: Sweet Gertrude. That was all they had wanted. Nothing more than that single song. And it came over me then like a kick in the ass, this was the second time in a long performing life that the request had come and I failed. What struck me most they were men. The time before as well, it was a man who asked. I think I know why. The song is the voice of a man, isn’t it, confessing to himself in retrospect, remembering the early relationship he squandered, the foolishness, the blindness, the immaturity that can never be undone, only replayed in the mind like torture. They must have recognized themselves in him. I thought of that scene in Sweet and Lowdown, Sean Penn, alone, smashing his guitar, not from rage but that piercing awareness that he destroyed the one thing that mattered, that he had squandered love beyond repair. That scene is unbearable to watch, and yet it is what remains after the music stops.