Boo.

The brilliance of her delivery, from the childish care she took placing miniature pumpkins on the piano to the humor in her song about a 99-cent Jesus statue, faded to disappointment by the night's end. Regina Spektor, who had captured my heart just hours earlier, broke it when she said she wasn't interested in being the subject of my Master's project.

"I'm a private person," she said, looking like she felt genuinely sorry for me. "Good luck though."

A woman who worked at Warner Brothers, Jen Still, had warned me just minutes earlier that Spektor was swamped. Regina had signed with a major record label recently, which I knew, and was planning a European tour.

I expected a thick line of tape between myself and Regina's henchmen, but I had never considered the notion that Regina herself might not want my unsolicited attention.

What made it worse was how great I thought her playing and singing had been tonight. She'd played familiar songs from her recent release, "Soviet Kitsch" and new songs like the lilting "Blue Lips." She'd asked for something at the end of every song: water, more cello, more voice, a muffled snare. After each request, she'd smiled with the self-assurance of a girl who knows she's darling.

I wanted to lease her energy. I wanted to condense it like the oddly-textured conglomerate in fishball soup and eat it up.

But more than singing and writing about her songs, I wanted to sing and write songs of my own. Not just because I felt violated by the intense disinterest in my authorial voice that she had expressed. Mainly because watching her up on stage, with her luscious black curls and her littleboy grin, made me want to trade my journalist's hat for that of a musician.

After trading years of piano study in pursuit of a writing degree, I'm a bigger flip-flopper than Kerry.