I admire saloon singers who keep seeing dream-castles through the smoke. : Make It One for My Baby

The glass-cased candles flicker in a breeze that whispers through a rear door, laying small shadows on the white-clothed tables. A single spotlight frames Nick Edenetti as he cues the band then turns to face an almost-empty house.

It is midnight on a misty Thursday and Edenetti is making music.

He is singing “Make It One for My Baby,” and if you turn your head away from where he is perched on a stool by the piano you’ll swear it is Frank Sinatra himself up there, that he has come in out of the night with a raincoat slung over his shoulder, the way he used to.

Turned just at the right angle so that the spot hits him at a three-quarter glance, Edenetti even looks like Sinatra, so complete is the illusion he creates on stage. He’s that good.

Don’t say it. You’re thinking, “Then what’s he doing playing to a dozen people in a Chinese restaurant on a nowhere street in Burbank?” Hell, man, you play where they hire you, you do what you can and you never stop singing.

Nick knows that. He’s maybe on the down side of 45 and has been on the club circuit for 25 years, from Miami Beach to Vegas, and in a lot of towns you’ve never even heard of. Big stages. Strip joints. Everything.

“I’m a saloon singer,” he says in the Sinatra impression he does, “and I make no apologies.” None needed.

I sat with Nick after the dinner show. As we talked I couldn’t help thinking how many of these guys I’ve known over the years and how much energy they bring to the pursuit of a dream.

They work half the night in places where their billing is just a little higher on the menu than the Szechwan pork, sing to audiences only slightly larger than the band and still see dreams glowing in the dark, like those glass-enclosed candles.

The work is hard. Nick figures he has memorized 200 Sinatra songs and can’t even compute the number of hours he has spent singing along with records cut by Old Blue Eyes, until he had the unique Sinatra phrasing down almost perfectly.

“When I was 21 and doing a Sinatra impression in Miami Beach, Frank himself came in just before the show,” Nick is saying. “It scared hell out of me. I announced that for obvious reasons I wasn’t going to do the impression and he says, ‘Go ahead, kid, do it.’

“It was a 30-second song but it lasted four days, if you know what I mean. Everything went wrong. It was the worst song I ever did. I ran to the dressing room afterward and when someone said Sinatra wanted to see me I said, ‘Tell him I died.’

“But I did see him and you know what he says? He says, ‘You may not have a lot of talent, kid, but you’ve got a lot of balls.’ ”

Nick laughs at the memory, takes the last Camel from a pack of cigarettes and lights it. Someone says he shouldn’t smoke. He shrugs. He is wearing a dark blazer with an open-collared white shirt and a gold chain that glows in the half-light.

“I’ve been doing a whole Sinatra show since December,” Nick says. He calls it a playography. “We opened right here. Thursday is kind of an off night. The weekends are good.”

He orders a V.O. on the rocks and buys me a scotch and water. I feel as though I am in the 1960s again, staying up late at clubs in San Francisco’s North Beach in the days when Woody Allen played the hungry i and the Smothers Brothers were at the Purple Onion.

There is a kind of midnight weariness to it all, and I begin to feel it at the China Trader.

But Nick wants to talk so I listen because I admire saloon singers who keep seeing dream-castles through the smoke and who can turn Burbank into Broadway just standing in a spotlight.

I learn that Nick was born in Manhattan and raised in Brooklyn, and that he began doing impersonations in the Navy, mimicking a chief petty officer with an Arnold Stang voice.

“Joe E. Lewis got me started with music,” Nick says, sipping his V.O.

Lewis was an old-time singer who got his throat cut by the mob and turned to comedy.

“I used to drive a cab in Miami Beach and he heard me singing one day and let me join his act. He became my, what do you call it, mentor?”

I ask Nick if Sinatra knows about the show and he says yeah, probably.

“I don’t think Frank minds,” he says. “I’m not trying to be Sinatra, I’m creating an illusion. If I live to be a million I will never be as good as him.”

Then he gets up because he wants me to hear how much he can sound like Old Blue Eyes doing songs that Sinatra never sang, and I get 45 minutes of magic.

There are maybe three of us left in the China Trader and the place is getting ready to close, but Nick sings like the room is packed, still holding the cigarette, a thin tendril of smoke frozen in the spotlight.

By the time I leave, the night air has a snap to it and the street is empty. I drive home hearing Nick doing Sinatra in my head, doing it with all his heart for people eating egg rolls and won ton. Make it one for my baby . . .

Sinatra was only half-right. The kid’s got talent too.