Perched on a stool on the stage at Don’t Tell Mama, the look on the face of the man in his forties alternates between titillation and terror. The chanteuse of the evening—old enough to be his, well, much older sister—is in a silver and blue sequined, floor-length strapless gown with a seductive slit up the left leg and is purring the Fred Ahlert/Roy Turk torch song “Mean to Me” (most memorably delivered by Doris Day when she played singer Ruth Etting in the film Love Me or Leave Me). This version, however, is more lasciviousness than lament. She paws at every part of the younger man’s upper thigh area, except the one that would get her arrested, and comes as close to giving a lap dance as she can without actually mounting her prey.

It was well into the second half of the recent preview of her show Cougars on the Prowl when veteran cabaret singer Patricia Fitzpatrick was at her friskiest, but the erotic and comic tone of the evening had been set from her opening number, a bawdy version of  the Peggy Lee/ Jack Wilton Marshall “I Like Men.” (“I like ‘em big . . .” got the biggest laugh, natch.) From there, Fitzpatrick—who will bring the show back for a run at the same venue in late March—was completely unapologetic about her interest in and appetite for younger men, especially during a time in American culture when many women “of a certain age” are wearing the label “cougar” like a badge of honor. You gotta love an older woman who announces to Viagra-using gentlemen: “If you suddenly get an erection that lasts for four hours, don’t call the doctor, call me.”

In the years before she took a twenty-year hiatus from performing to raise a family, Fitzpatrick was a soprano, but she is now more an alto with a fairly limited range. But she makes up for that with a smooth, honey-tinged and evocative delivery that sounds like it’s actually been enhanced by years of smokes, stories and the occasional scotch. And when she charmingly navigated around the flubs she and her fine musical director Barry Levitt made during the relatively obscure “Only an Older Woman” heard in The Boy from Oz, she revealed her professional and comic chops.

Fitzpatrick’s set wasn’t all about being the sexually aggressive predator ready to pounce on younger men. Her heartfelt rendering of “What Did I Have That I Don’t Have” would do Barbra, Liza and Eydie Gorme proud, and came from someone who obviously has experienced it all when it comes to relationships and aging.

Like almost all cats, the cougar is a solitary animal, but in cabaret they obviously run in packs. In Helena Grenot and Dana Lorge, Fitzpatrick selected two of the cabaret scene’s saltiest mamas to run with. After soulfully sashaying through “Is You Is Or Is You Ain’t My Baby,” Grenot tried to seduce her handsome (and young) Latin bass player, Ariel De La Portilla, with her eyes all through “I Don’t Stand a Ghost of a Chance with You.” After Fitzpatrick’s parody of “Where or When” (during which she told a true and hilarious story about having sex multiple times with a man who never could remember their affair), Wednesday Night at the Iguana Cabaret hostess Lorge charmed her way through Kander & Ebb’s “Everybody’s Girl.” Then, looking like a cougar cowgirl from the 92^nd Street Y, Lorge had the audience in hysterics during “The Ballad of Irving” (“…the 142^nd fastest gun in the West” from the record album When You’re in Love the Whole World Is Jewish.

The surprise of the night might have come toward the end of the set with Fitzpatrick’s achingly poignant rendition of a new ballad, “Why Can’t You Fall in Love with Me”(written for her by friend and composer Bob Levy), during which this cougar lays it on the line to a universe of younger men: “Before I cry and fall apart, why can’t you love the woman that I am, the girl inside and not the one you see. Oh why, oh why, can’t you fall in love with me.”

Men of various ages may find it hard not to fall prey to this particular cougar’s charms.

Stephen Hanks
Cabaret Scenes
November 18, 2010
www.cabaretscenes.org