Bleu Django performing at Amplify Nashville December of 2023. photo by Cindy Steele
Meanwhile, Dutton also had taken some acting classes, but was too scared to do auditions. She and some friends launched a production company, The Drama Tree Players, which produced off-off Broadway shows.
That steeled her nerves to do auditions, to some of which, when appropriate, she took her fiddle, which landed her, among others, a role as a fiddleplaying evangelist. With Dutton’ s reputation building, she landed roles in other shows, including a comedy musical about Jesse James, with which she toured to play at the Ford’ s Theater in Washington, D. C., the Coconut Grove Playhouse in Miami, and the Charles Playhouse in Boston.
When she first arrived in New York, Dutton moved in with three other women in an apartment, but a couple of years later, she found a rent-controlled apartment on East 84th Street, the Upper East Side, paying $ 65 a month. She stayed there for about a decade.
She lived in Greenwich Village for a while with a boyfriend and later moved to Soho in the late 1970s, when the area“ was still kind of empty and weird and dark and strange,” she said.
The area consisted primarily of cast iron buildings and warehouses that weren’ t zoned for residential living, but in which people started squatting, and which attracted artists because of the big spaces.
“ You would not believe the rats, the size of cats …. It was amazing,” Dutton said.“ That’ s what it was like there in the’ 70s. It was just like this dark, grimy place with a few little bars around.”
Eventually, the tenants got together, bought the building for $ 500,000, and got everything up to code. Dutton lived in the loft for about 20 years.
Today, each of those floors is worth millions of dollars, she said.
In 2000, she decided to leave the East Coast, in part because at her age, almost 60, she was struggling to get as many parts as she did when she was younger.
“ I wasn’ t the young, cute, little thing,” Dutton said.“ And I was tired.
“ I said,‘ I’ ve had it with New York,’” she said with a laugh.“ I had done as much as I wanted to do.”
She sold her loft— for a nice return on her initial investment— and came back to Indiana, because of her father, Judson.
After her return she decided she was not done with music, and in 2003, obtained from Indiana University a master’ s degree in jazz studies.
Dutton said that when she lived in New York, she thought she would only ever leave the city to move to the south of France, a Caribbean island— or Brown County, where she and her family had traveled often when she was younger.
Continued on 49 Sept./ Oct. 2024 • Our Brown County 47