SHE “GOT” THEM ALL

Ada Cable enjoys an enviable reputation as a woman who does impressions, via her elastic voice and face, of countless others. What distinguishes her impersonations from those of the majority of performers who devote themselves to a similar task is that she does not apply her skill to the famous, but to those around her. She is on intimate terms with her subjects, the practitioner of an art akin to that of Gertrude Howard, a stage performer from decades earlier who would select people from the audience and then mimic them exactly. But Cable does not work onstage. She is a street performer who remains mostly in her neighborhood. Moreover, she is not identifiable as a performer at all. She makes her way down sidewalks, unassuming in stature, dressed like any other young woman, and is not considered noteworthy in any way until she decides to be. Thursday afternoon last on Cubestorm Avenue, she offered a prime example of her talent as she strolled from Pinlack up to Fow. Along the way, she began to stop one pedestrian and then the next, each of whom she imitated perfectly, capturing every vocal and physical mannerism. She “got” Dr. Arnold David, who has a distinctive heavy-lidded gaze and a voice that, while not exactly high, can leap upward in times of excitement. She “got” Maxine Bravos, whose unique accent commingles the heritage of her parents, Mexican and German and Eastern European. She “got” Lucy Robinson,  who is double-jointed in her thumbs and has designed a repertoire of gestures around that fact.  She even “got” Jason Warner, the local druggist, who has virtually no distinguishing characteristics. “My wife tells me I’m the most ordinary man ever,” he said, a sentence that Cable repeated with eerie precision, somehow able to compose her face to reproduce his anonymous good looks to such a degree that Cable’s wife, standing nearby, burst into tears. More than twenty pedestrians in all were stopped, simulated, and sent away forever dazzled. Walks of this nature, repeated on Spate Avenue and Plick Avenue, are supplemented by a series of similar performances that she calls “invisible imitations,” that is, exactly copying the mannerisms and intonations of people of her own invention. Here, she may at one minute inhabit the twangy Southern rhythms of an elderly preacher, and at the next the broad flat Midwestern diction of a middle-aged classics professor whose impending sabbatical year is filling her with a sense of excitement as she contemplates a dissipated carnal summer with her partner. It is no matter to Cable that these are fabricated rather than actual subjects. Her abilities are every bit as wondrous, and the sense here is the same, which is the belief that it is the actual personages in attendance rather than Cable herself. Throughout she proves that she is emotionally moved but not moved aside by her subjects. She has said that she hopes to expand her palette even further and is considering impersonating landscapes: the fetid greens and browns of a marsh, the shadow-catching white of a new snowfall. No doubt she will prove herself once again with this new challenge. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas