Since September 11, 2001, New York City, which has a generous supply of landmarks, has been shy two. So New Yorkers are placing even more value on those remaining. One of them is Bobby Short, the cabaret entertainer.

Some years ago, Short was named a "living landmark" by a city conservancy he's not certain which one. He was among five given the designation, and no one questioned his right to the title. The dapper fellow, who is finishing his 34th year as a fixture at the swanky Café Carlyle, represents a particular kind of New York sophistication. More than that: when he sits at the piano or stands up behind it pointing his arms to the ceiling and clapping and delivering tunes with gravelly but clarion tones, he is sophistication's embodiment.

A few decades back, Short released a record called "Jump for Joy," and he's been doing just that ever since he began playing around New York after having had a career as a child performer who regularly toured the country's vaudeville houses. He's definitely grown older and is now well into his seventies, but with his round cheeks and unlined face and a smile that at once takes delight in his audience and in himself, he doesn't look his age. He could pass for a robust 50-year-old.

A few nights ago, I figured that when so much seems to up in the compromised Manhattan air, I'd go see Short and find out whether his effervescence has been diminished as a result. I discovered that at a time when so much seems wrong with the world, Short continues to indicate what can be so right. To send the message he sings songs by the best American composers and lyricists of the 20th century black or white, he doesn't care which.

Correction: he does care which. He cares deeply about what lyrics, whether they are by Andy Razaf or Lorenz Hart or Ira Gershwin, are saying on subjects as opposed as gaiety and depression. He disdains cheap sentiment and cherishes words that quicken the mind and heart. For his current run he does two three-months run a year at the Carlyle and they aren't inexpensive. He is including, as he always does, Cole Porter's throwaway paean to love-gained-and-lost, "Just One of Those Things" as well as an obscure and saucy Porter item called "Pilot Me (Pilote-Moi)." But he is also quite pointedly opening and closing his rousing set with songs that nod at the dire nature of current events but insist on optimism. The first is called "Tomorrow Is Another Day"; the second, a song he reports he's known since he was five, is Willard Robison's "Wake Up Chillun Wake Up" "chillun," of course, meaning children. How pointed the advice, how cheerfully expressed.

There might be those who would look at and listen to Short and suggest that his sunny disposition isn't a reflection of today's realities. But, of course, they would be incorrect. Short's presence at the Carlyle and wherever else he transports his landmark self is a reminder that charm and indomitability and intelligence and, most of all, joy remain very, very real.

Also by David Finkle:
COFFEE-HOUSE BLUES
THE ZEN OF JAY-WALKING
CHANGING PLACES
DARKNESS AT NOON
UNION SQUARE
MAKING IT REAL