In a series of videos called “Songs of Love and Rage” I sing pop standards wearing a Groucho Marx nose, glasses, and mustache. Beyond its pop culture associations, the Groucho disguise plays a pragmatic role in providing some distance between my actual face and what I see when I look into the mirror of the MacBook screen camera. In “It Might As Well Be Spring,” a mash-up duet with musical comedy actress Bernadette Peters, I sit behind two large lilies in a vase singing Irving Berlin’s “I Wonder Why,” as Peters sings Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “It Might As Well Be Spring.” My effort to harmonize with Peters was earnest and sincere, and even though I can stay on key, the gap between professional and amateur is clear. Posing as Groucho allows me some comic space as a clown figure, but wearing the headphones contributes an additional line of defense: wherever Peters is during the performance, she is not visible except perhaps in my head, so her aesthetic approval of the collaboration is not an issue. Even as the audience and I experience Peters as a disembodied voice, the connection is intimate, akin to harmonizing with the car radio or singing in the shower. The sound in one’s ears eliminates the discontinuities of time and space, as the force of identification with lyrics, voice, melody, beat, and emotional appeal largely mitigates critical judgment.

Then again, the video is an edited recording of a recording so when and how it happened becomes less important then when, where, and how it is viewed. The songs were chosen by me because their lyrics could function as commentaries on the video’s effects and premises, and in both cases the power of infatuation is key. Within the narrative arc of these songs, the loss of everyday perspective, the projection of one’s happiness or needs onto the outside world, the pleasure of submission to disorientation, passion, and fantasy, all signal the possibility, if not the presence, of a sustainable connection.

Yet it is also possible to see such intoxications of the heart as a delusion, as would be the case with real-world infatuations which are as often not reciprocal, no less consummated. These video performances primarily circulate from my website; they rely on a sympathetic audience of one.