Née-met at Night

I usually listen to WQXR (96.3 FM), the New York Times’ classical music station, when I’m working at home. This isn’t embarrassing. When I’m being “productive” I don’t want to be “distracted” and the yawning gaps in my classical music knowledge ensure that all those lilting strings and bleating horns stay firmly in the background. But WQXR has a late-night dj. Her name is Nimet Habachy, she knows four languages fluently (English, Arabic, French, and Italian), and she pronounces her first name with the care and delicacy of a waitress in a $100-a-plate French restaurant listing the final, crucial ingredient in some obscure white wine sauce - “Née-met.” I love her. I find her very distracting. This is very embarrassing.

Her show is called New York at Night and it runs from midnight to 5:30am every weeknight. Ms. Habachy (I will call her respectfully “Née-met” for the remainder), born and bred in Cairo, has been gracing New York’s insomniacs with her deliciously cosmopolitan voice since 1982. She generally spins the standards – Debussy (“De-bú-see”), Mozart (“Mo-zart”), Chopin (“Cho-pa”) – and admirably so. But it isn’t the music that’s interesting about this former language coach. It’s Née-met’s super-sophisticated affect, her un-self-conscious self-consciousness that makes her seem like some relic of 1940’s Manhattan. She’s straight out of some Bogart or Clark Gable flick. Her on-air presentation is as blissfully archaic as a soft-focus wedding photograph of your grandmother . . . And so is her bio photo online.

Née-met speaks of using those wee hours to comfort people in great periods of mourning or sickness. This is admirable I suppose – whatever it takes to justify heading in to the office at 11:30pm every night. As for myself, neither grief-stricken nor bed-ridden, I prefer to use Née-met for a different purpose – as a healthy, though no less guilty, distraction from the pains of graduate journalism school. I wonder how Née-met would pronounce “query” . . .