(BittenByAZebra)
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Melissa Levis isn’t your typical Upper East Side mom. Sure, she lives on East 75th Street, her husband works in real estate and she spends hours shuttling her overscheduled 7-year-old son (who’s writing an adventure novel set in Vermont, naturally) to tae kwon do, improv lessons and pottery classes. But when she’s not zipping about the city as “Monty’s mom,” she’s spreading the message of kid power as “Moey,” her pink-velvet-attired, guitar-strumming alter ego.
Levis, you see, is the pied piper (in pink) of the UES. She and her band, Moey’s Music Party, have been crooning original songs for tens of thousands of New York children since 2005. She’s put out three CDs of child-friendly tunes thus far, and Levis says there’s another six in the pipeline. She sounds like a folkier female version of Charlie Sheen’s “Charlie Waffles” character on “Two and a Half Men.”
Luckily, the 41-year-old has a devoted fan base ready to devour the incoming wave of playground ditties and potty-time ballads.
John Varvatos’ wife Joyce even cleared her sprawling Fifth Avenue living room to ensure that her daughter has plenty of room to dance to Moey’s music.
“I have one child, and so in order to get all the other kids here, I have every princess costume in the world, and all the kids come here and we have a princess party and everyone dances to Moey’s music in front of a big mirror,” says 40-something Varvatos.
Levis, for her part, is surprised by the enthusiasm. “Joyce once said to me, ‘This is where the magic happens ,’ and I was like, ‘You mean that’s where Dolce and Gabbana show their spring collection?’ And she said, ‘No — this is where we dance to your DVD!’ ”
Levis’ hand-waving hits include rocker anthem “I Always Sit When I Eat,” the cautionary “Pierre Wouldn’t Wash His Hair” and a techno-style tune for the city’s more culinary curious children, “Sushi Symphony,” which includes the catchy chorus: “Sushi, sushi, sushi, sushi hoochi coochi/Arigato, arigato, arigato, miso full!”
“I’m like a walking party,” says Levis, who teaches music classes at the New York Junior League ($45 a pop for a drop-in).
She also performs at about 30 private kids’ parties a year. (It costs about $850 for Moey and another bandmate to perform.)
“She walks into the park and she’s like a rock star,” says Jaclynn Shweky, 45, who met Levis socially before she started taking her now 3-year-old daughter, Jillian, to Levis’ concerts.
“All the kids are yelling, ‘Moey, Moey!’ ”
“It’s funny. I have doormen and they see me come in dressed as Monty’s mom for school drop-off and then I come out dressed as Moey,” Levis says. “I feel a lot like Clark Kent.”
Levis’ songs are catchy, and are meant to inspire, too. Her “Happily Ever Moey!” CD started what she calls a “princess revolution.”
“It’s empowering children to rock out to new versions of classic fairy tales retold with music, sparkles and kid-power endings,” Levis says. “It’s bad enough that we have Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton as role models. Let’s have our fairy-tale princesses set a better example.”
With “The Princess and the Pea,” for example, “I turned it into a girl who slept on a Futon and gave her 20 mattresses to the homeless,” she says.
Levis has been a professional songwriter since 1991, when the Brown grad was hired by the Palm restaurant in East Hampton to entertain disgruntled customers forced to wait 50 minutes for a table. She serenaded them with the likes of Bob Dylan, along with a few original tunes.
One patron found Levis’ one-of-a-kind melodies so entertaining, she asked her to pen a song for a friend’s wedding.
Her payment? $100 and three blind dates, courtesy of the well-connected diner.
Soon, Levis was charging $5,000 for such tunes — flying from Beverly Hills to Aspen to Palm Beach to play for the likes of Brian Mulroney, the former prime minister of Canada, and Ron Galotti, then-publisher of Vogue.
“[Ron’s] was the only song I ever wrote that had a dirty word in it,” Levis says.
“He always cursed, and these are like musical portraits of somebody — you have to capture them.”
Even though her one-off songs pay the bills, it’s Levis’ Moey tracks that pluck her heart strings — and those of her tiny fans.
“The first class we went to, Jillian was 1 year old. She was absolutely mesmerized between all of Melissa’s bright colors and feathered boas,” says Shweky. “I have pictures of Jillian literally standing 10 inches from the guitar, just staring at her.”