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There's a Porter swing and a twangy zing deep in the heart of Dixie. Dixie Carter, that is. "We're all sittin' close together, hunkered down in the dark, sippin' on something alcoholic, dreamin' dreams." She pauses, lets the image hang in the night, sighs. "That's cabaret. That's what I love."
Carter opened a month-long engagement last week at the Cafe Carlyle, where she first sang, vamped and clowned a decade ago.
She couldn't make it last year because of a schedule conflict -- she was starring in Master Class on Broadway. "It tore me up," she says, "but there wasn't no way I could fit it in."
Carter talks that way sometimes, mostly when she hears another Southern drawl. Hers is straight, small-town Tennessee -- "the backside of nowhere," in her words. "McLemoresville. It's just off I-70 between Nashville and Memphis."
She was born there 58 years ago, and when she was 4, she says, she was turned onto music. Not the Grand Ole Opry, broadcast live from just down the road every Saturday night, but Grand Opera, broadcast live from faraway New York every Saturday afternoon.
"I told Mama and Daddy then I was going to sing," says Carter, "and I did."
The cabaret part came after she saw and heard Felicia Sanders and Mabel Mercer, two of New York's most celebrated nightlife divas, shortly after she arrived here from Memphis in 1963.
Now, after all the work on TV (Designing Women and a slew of other stuff), the stage (Pal Joey, A Couple of White Chicks . . . , etc.), concert tours, fitness videos and her autobiography, Carter's still singing her heart out.
At the Carlyle -- "my room," she calls it -- she switches gears as deftly as a long-haul trucker, from Sondheim ("Every Day a Little Death") and Bruce Springsteen ("I'm on Fire") to Dylan ("Don't Think Twice, It's All Right") and Shel Silverstein ("Beans Taste Fine").
She even blows a few notes on a trumpet. "I haven't kept my lip," she says, "but I practice enough to fake it."
A lot of old friends, some going back to her first days in New York, were in the audience opening night. One was singer/composer John Wallowitch, who wrote an album's worth of songs for her (recorded eight years ago at, yes, the Carlyle).
"Cabaret is about staying up late, carrying on and getting romantic," says Carter, but it's also about the bittersweet, bawdy and bewitched. "Yeah, the point is the experience."
She lives in Los Angeles now, with third husband Hal Holbrook, but still gets home to McLemoresville (pop.: "about 311") every Christmas. Her mother died several years ago and her father moved to Los Angeles, but he kept the farm, "which is right on Main St.," and she keeps it up.
She also stays in close touch with her Aunt Helen, who owns a health food store in Memphis. She came up to New York for the Carlyle opening and brought a care package that included a concoction of flax seed oil, organic strawberries and cottage cheese, all mushed together.
"It's what fights off my arthritis," says Carter.
For all the silk and Champagne ("my vice"), Carter is still a good ol' girl in many ways. "I love Waylon Jennings," she says, "and Johnny Cash and Willie. Wanna here some Waylon?"
Sure.
"I've always been crazy," she croons, putting just the right honky-tonk slur into Jenning's big 1978 hit with that title. "I know a bunch of 'em."
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