WASHINGTON (AP) _ After a long day of performing brain surgery, Dr. Bernard Stopak loves nothing better than slipping into a tuxedo, grabbing a microphone and crooning ″Let’s Get Away From It All″ before a night club audience.

By day, he’s a prominent neurosurgeon at George Washington University Medical Center. By night, he’s a cabaret singer who cures his listeners’ blues with a finger-snapping repertoire of jazz and Broadway show tunes.

A vocalist in the mellow Tony Bennett style, Bernie Stopak has composed a few songs in his car, a sort of portable studio equipped with tape deck. The tunes pop into his head while he’s driving from one hospital to another, he says.

One of his originals, ″Remember Me,″ is the title song of his first album, which was released in 1987 and features Stopak singing such golden oldies as ″Makin’ Whoopee″ and ″Old Devil Moon.″

″I was big in Elkton, Md.,″ he says with a smile. ″I was sixth on the charts at the radio station there.″

Stopak enjoys the best of both worlds - medicine and show business - and sees a link between the two.

″The delicate surgery that I perform, which is often a life-and-death situation, is really theater at its most dramatic, and it requires a considerable degree of creativity,″ he said in an interview.

″Singing, though certainly not life-threatening, can be very inventive in creating various moods and interpretations of music.″

The son of Russian immigrants who operated a mom-and-pop Jewish delicatessen in Washington, Stopak grew up with music. His parents gave him a violin when he was 5, and he still remembers his first case of stage fright.

″I had to play at an elementary school talent show or something,″ he said. ″I got so nervous seeing the crowd that I turned around and played the violin with my back to the audience.″

As he got older, Stopak played horns, saxophone and clarinet in the local police boy’s band, the old Washington Redskins band and a jazz band he formed in high school called the Young Moderns. He worked his way through the University of Maryland playing music.

He also sang in student musicals and toured with two university choral groups. By early 1961, he was good enough to sing with a dance band at one of President Kennedy’s inaugural balls, where he attracted the attention of actress Angie Dickenson. A year or two later, he flew to California to see her.

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″I had a feeling I could make it in show business,″ he said, but Miss Dickenson ″turned my life around.″

″She told me, ‘whatever you do in life, the first thing you have to be is a man.’ That’s what I always heard from my family. ‘Zoy a mensch - Be a man.’ I thought, do I want to be singing and playing in life, or do I want to do something substantial? That’s when I got serious about medicine.″

For the next quarter-century, Stopak studied medicine in France and returned to perform thousands of operations and become associate professor of neurosurgery at George Washington University, specializing in brain surgery under a microscope.

Then, nearly five years ago, some jazz musician friends made a surprise appearance at his 48th birthday party, and Stopak rediscovered the joy of singing with a combo. After he won applause singing with the band at a friend’s wedding at the Carlyle Hotel in New York, Stopak decided it was time to pursue an after-hours musical career.

When he wasn’t performing surgery, he was performing at jazz clubs, restaurants, hotel lounges and other night spots in Washington and New York until early 1988, when a traumatic divorce put his singing on temporary hold.

Now remarried to a fellow neurosurgeon, Juliet, and the proud father of a son born last June, Stopak, 52, is eager to return to the stage and recording studio.

He no longer suffers stage fright, but admits that his mouth still gets dry before he sings that first note.

″I am much more comfortable in the operating theater than on stage,″ he said. ″In surgery, you have the time to make a move, then back off, stop and think about it. But when you’re performing, you can’t stop. If you make a mistake, you hum a few notes, laugh it off, shrug and keep going.″

Said Stopak: ″In surgery, if something goes wrong, the worst that can happen is you lose the patient, which is always agonizing. On stage, the worst they can do is boo, and I can handle that.″