Category Archives: Music

As I sort through the various missed opportunities and regrets in my life, I keep coming back to two things; the time that I absolutely blew my college interview at Stanford (when asked to describe “who I was” to some pompous interviewer, I said, “that’s personal and I don’t wish to discuss it!), and the fact that I never saw the Beatles live.  I was first introduced to the Beatles at Ty Winterbotham’s house.  There was some sort of slumber party going on and she had the 45 of “I Saw Her Standing There” blaring into her living room.  It was a magical moment as everyone danced together and shouted the lyrics “When she crossed that room, my heart went boom and I held her hand in my-eeen!”  Please note that the early Beatle lyrics were nothing but doggerel. 

While I was not a passionate Beatles fan, they did hold an abiding interest.  John was married, Ringo was just too butt ugly to generate any appeal and Paul was of course the cutest.  That left George as the more creative favorite.  As a parent, I kept impressing on my young children that it was very important that they know all the names of the Beatles, and I would periodically spring pop quizzes in the car.  Unfortunately Frances always confused George Harrison with George Bush!  My father initially dismissed the Beatles as freaks, and confidently stated, “They won’t last a year.”  It must have been 1964, because I triumphantly remember buying the album Beatles ’65.

We did manage to go to a few concerts.  The Dave Clark Five stands out, because they were thought to be a knock off of the Beatles.  I remember closing my eyes at the concert and pretending they were the Beatles, but the effort fell short.  Another concert I distinctly remember was the Rolling Stones.  My mother had agreed to drive us down to McCormick place, but announced that she was not going to waste her money on this and would spend the time at a museum instead.  However, when we arrived, she reframed the event as a sociology field trip and decided that she would try and sneak into the concert.  We wished her good luck and scurried to our seats on the main floor. 

At the first chord, probably  “I can’t get no satisfaction,” we started screaming ourselves silly, for no other reason that we were so thrilled to be part of a joyous mass hysteria. 

When I see the black and white footage of the Beatles arriving in the United States, I think how great it would be to one of the teenagers in one of the crowd shots – a teenager with smudged, tear-streaked cheeks, wearing a cute buttoned-up shirt rumpled by the press of the crowd, hanging  over a fence in the remote hopes of spotting one of the Fab Four.  Now that would be something to show the kids.  If only I had gone to Woodstock.  In the middle of the Woodstock sound track, as an illustration of the mayhem, an announcer says, “Allan Fay, come to the blue tent, it’s a bummer, man.”  Just think, it could have been, “Bobbie Brown, come to the tent, it’s a bummer man.” 

 As we limply exited the auditorium, we found my mother totally pleased with herself.    She had indeed managed to sneak in.  She told the usher that she was ticketless because  she had left the auditorium to deal with her splitting headache.  She then produced the bottle of aspirin that she had just bought as a prop.  She feigned a grimace of agony, and as an added touch right out of an Excedrin TV ad, lightly pressed her fingertips to her temples. 

She then said that she had left her young daughter inside, who was probably beside herself with worry at that point.  The overwhelmed usher fell for it, and let her in.  She made her way to the top row of the topmost balcony, “I was in hysteria heaven,” she exulted, “The blond singer looked exactly like Lulu Runnells!”  The blond singer was Brian Jones who would die of a drug overdose the following year, and Lulu Runnells was one of Lake Forest’s most fashionable socialites.

 They say that every generation must have its own music, but the rock and roll of the 60s has transcended generations.  The Beatles and Rolling Stones are all well-represented on my kids’ iPODS, and they are always amazed when I already know the lyrics to “their” music.  I can even introduce them to some new music.  One of them was Procul Harum, who were something of a one hit wonder with their song “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” also known as  AWSoP on the internet fan club site.  

With the exception of Louie, Lou-ay, one of the advantages of early 60s music was that the lyrics could be distinctly heard and understood.  But by the time of the 1967 release AWSoP,  while you could still hear the words, the lyrics had moved far beyond the hand-holding  innocence of the early 60s.  There is much discussion of the meaning of AWSoP.  Two theories are most plausible to me.  One is that the “Whiter Shade of Pale” refers to Marilyn Monroe and her doomed love affair with JFK; the crowd calling out for more refers to her memorable and slutty singing of Happy Birthday, Mr. President, to a sold out crowd in Madison Square Garden.  The other obvious theory is that the “Whiter Shade of Pale” refers to cocaine, and the lyrics are a delusional mess.  I am very literal and linear person, so the following fanagram represents an attempt to tidy up the lyrics.

The missing words in the following poem are anagrams (post, stop, spot) and the number of dashes indicates the number of letters.  One of the missing words will rhyme with either the preceding or following lines.  Your job is to figure out the words from the context of the poem.  Scroll down for the answers.

I hit my head bang bango, while turning cartwheels ‘cross the floor,

 I begin to —— like I’m seasick, but the crowd calls out for more,

The room was humming harder, as my soul did —— away,

When we called out for another drink the waiter brought a tray

And so it was that later as the doctor told his tale

That my face, at first just ghostly, turned a —— shade of pale

Real lyrics:

We skipped the light fandango, turned cartwheels ‘cross the floor

I was feeling kinda seasick, as the crowd calls out for more.

The room was humming harder as the ceiling flew away

When we called out for another drink the waiter brought a tray

And so it was that later as the miller told his tale

That her face, at first just ghostly, turned a whiter shade of pale

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Answers:  writhe, wither, whiter

Allan Sherman, of Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh fame, enjoyed an intense but brief popularity, releasing three albums in 1963 and then a rapid decline and premature death at age 49.  But it is still easy to identify an Allan Sherman fan some 46 years later.  I was standing in a buffet line with a medical colleague and a third person came up and said, “I always appreciate a good pair ‘o docs,” and both of us the recited the complete stanza, “a pair o’ noia is just a bunch of mental blocks, and when Ben Casey meets Kildare, that’s a ‘pair o’ docs.” 

Allan Sherman was a staple of my childhood since my mother idolized his word play and parodies, a talent that was right smack in her wheelhouse as she routinely wrote similar songs for birthdays and other family events.  An Allan Sherman biography notes that he started as a producer of the quiz show, “I’ve Got a Secret,” which landed him in Hollywood where he entertained at parties, including his neighbor Harpo Marx, and ba-da-bing all of he suddenly had a record contract and became a bi-coastal toast of the town.  Even as a ten year old, I knew something extraordinary was happening when my mother  put on her heels and poppit faux pearls to go downtown to a nightclub to hear Allan Sherman perform.  My parents never strayed from the comfy confines of their leafy suburb and rarely socialized with anybody beyond two or three degrees of separation.  Who knows, there might have been some swingers at a nightclub!  Maybe my mother was a bit jealous of Allan Sherman, but probably more excited that this sort of clever talent was well appreciated. 

Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh apparently reached number 3 on the popular record charts, surpassing Elvis Presley and the early efforts of the Beatles.  The song, which is set to the tune of a Ponchielli opera, recounts the misery of a child just arriving at a summer camp.  “I went hiking with Joe Spivey, he developed poison ivy. Do you remember Leonard Skinner, they’re organizing a search party after dinner.”  It is hard to explain the popularity of this song – I certainly don’t think that it was his best – but one commentator thinks that it touched on the universal themes of fitting in, and in fact, assimilation was a central theme in Allan Sherman’s life.  His early songs were mostly parodies on Jewish folk songs and culture.  “Hava Nagila” became “Harvey and Sheila” and Alouetta became “Al ‘n Yetta.”  “Frere Jacques” became Sarah Jockman and Jerry Bachman exchanging gossip (How’s your cousin Shirley, well she got married early) and God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman turned into “God Rest You Jerry Mendelbaum.” 

However, Allan Sherman expanded beyond Jewish folk tunes – there were send ups of suburbia (Here’s to the Crabgrass), space travel and aliens (Six Foot Two, Solid Blue) and technology (Automation).  He frequently poked fun at himself.  In “Hail to Thee Fat Person” Sherman explained that his rotund figure was essentially the result of the Marshall Plan – his mother constantly told him to clean his plate because there were people starving in Europe.  In fact due to his efforts and those of other tubby patriots, “we kept this country out of war!” 

Allan also went were the where the original lyrics and his fervid imagination took him.  The song “You Went the Wrong Way Old King Louie,” was one of his better efforts, set to the tune of “You’ve Come a Long Way From St. Louis.”  This song was one of our family favorites. 

 You went the wrong way old King Louie, you made the population cry

‘Cause all you did was sit and pet with Marie Antoinette at your place in Versailles.

 Now we’re gonna take you and the queen down to the guillotine somewhere in the heart of town.

And when that fella’s through with what he’s going to do you’ll have no place to wear your crown.

 And now the country has gone kablooey -To King Louie was say fooey you disappointed all of France

But what can you expect from a king who wears silk stockings and pink satin pants.

 Allan Sherman was the master of the unexpected rhyme, which turned the lyrics from stupidly stupid to funnily stupid.  As you listened to the song, you would hear the word France and know a rhyme was coming, and you might anticipate dance, chance or evey romance, but you would never expect that it could be pants.  “C’est Si Bon,” became “I See Bones,” about a radiologist who sang, “I see things in your peritoneum that belong in the British Museum.”  I could picture Allan Sherman thumbing through his rhyming dictionary trying to find a rhyme for peritoneum.  Presented with few choices, he figured out a way to work “museum” into the verse. 

Similarly, my mother had a pink rhyming dictionary always at the ready near the kitchen telephone.  I think that her parodies peaked with a birthday song that she wrote for one of her friends with the improbable name of Hempie, who had just had a bout with jaundice after eating some bad sea food.  

“Hempie you excite us when you talk of hepatitis,

Your stool they had to study, since your eyeballs were so cruddy”

She was so taken with the excite us/hepatitis doublet that she used it almost annually as she serenaded Hempie.

“Hempie you no longer can excite us since you don’t have hepatitis

When your eyeballs stopped being yellow, you became a mellow fellow.”

 Sherman also wrote entirely new music which set him free from the limitations of a parody.  I think that his tour de force was “Good Advice” a song running about as long as Don McLean’s American Pie, where he provided advice to the great inventors throughout history.  Sherman encouraged Ben Franklin to go fly a kite even though it was raining, he told Isaac Newton to go take a nap under the apple tree to avoid getting sunburned, he pointed out to Otis that his moving box would work better if it went up and down instead of from side to side.  He gave his best piece of advice to the caveman Ooga MaGook who was uncertain what to do with his big square stone with a hole in the middle.  “Round off those corners, and Ooogie Baby, you’ve got the wheel!”  He would finish each verse with a two liner praising the advice – “I’m so worldly wise, I deserve a Nobel prize,” or “Harvard offered me a phi beta kappa key.”  I routinely use one of these lines as a staple of birthday songs that I have written – “The world is a better place since you joined the human race.”  (My other favorite line was written by my friend Sallie, “You are so very kind, you’d give your eyeballs to the blind.”)

 After poking around the internet, I found a YouTube video of Allan Sherman singing, which made more sense of the theme of assimilation.  Allan was singing with Dean Martin and Vic Damone, two of the coolest cats of the mid 1960s.  You sensed that Allan thought that he was finally part of the Hollywood elite, but it also looked like he was just trying a bit too hard, and that it just wasn’t going to happen.  Dean and Vic looked donair and elegant in their tuxedos, and the short, fat, Sherman with a buzz cut and heavy black glasses just looked out of place. The two men also had beautiful voices, and even though Allan sang on key, he really was not a great singer.  Sherman was eagerly grinning at his songs and glancing over at Dean and Vic, asking for approval.  Although Dean and Vic were smiling, it really looked more like they were laughing at him.  I think that Allan had failed to see the distinction between being part of the elite crowd and a buffoonish mascot, easily disposable.  Check out the video below.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vR9cT6Jyg4

After his initial three top selling albums, his songs became more pointed and bitter, perhaps because he found that the success he so coveted was actually hollow.  The Kennedy assassination soured the country’s mood as well.  He slipped into obscurity and found himself reduced to writing jingles for television commercials.  If Allan Sherman didn’t write it, he most certainly inspired the Burger King song from the 1970s:

“Hold the pickles, hold the lettuce, special orders don’t upset us.”  

All we ask is that you let us do it your way.”

The missing words in the following poem are all anagrams (i.e. like post, stop, spot) and the number of dashes indicates the number of letters.  One of the missing words will rhyme with the previous or following line.  Your job is to figure out the words based on the context of the poem.  Scroll down for answers. 

After Word War II, food was scarce and Europeans were starving and thin,

 That’s when Allan Sherman says his weight problems began to —–.

His mother said, “people are starving so you must clean your plate,

So he started to —– on pies and sweets and generally overate.   

This was the message of the Marshall plan that he could not ignore

He was told that —–fat is what keeps this country out of war!

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Answers:  begin, binge, being

The first image of Susan Boyle was a frowzy older women quietly sitting eating a sandwich in a room teeming with hopefuls waiting to perform on the British TV reality show, “Britain’s Got Talent.”  She came forward for a quick backstage interview and cheerfully admitted that she was never married, and in fact had never been kissed and lived alone with her cat Pebbles. 

Now picture a women with the physique of a stout pickle striding across the empty stage in sensible shoes, with a ribbon of sorts situated where one could imagine a waist once was.  She was wearing a matronly scooped neck lace number the same color of her pasty skin, and a contestant’s number was slapped haphazardly across her ample bosom.  When the judges asked her where she lived, she forgot the name of her village.  Then the judge grimaced at her age of 47, and in response did a very embarrassing bump and grind, which left both the audience and judges squirming uncomfortably in their seats.

 She indicated that she was ready to sing “I Dreamed a Dream” from the Les Miserables.  She faced three sharp tongued and cynical judges and an audience who presumably harbored a bizarre fascination in watching delusional singers totally humiliate themselves in front of a jeering crowd.  The introductory notes started and there were several moments of tension as everyone braced for some sort of atonal croak.  With a slight furrow of her uni-brow and clench of her double chin, Susan opened her mouth and sang.

Within one stanza of the song, the audience was on their feet cheering; her voice was brilliant.  The judges sat in slack-jawed shock.  But it was not so much her stunning soaring voice, but to me what was most remarkable was that it came out of this – let’s face it – total frump.  We rarely experience anything with a single sense, and are accustomed to seeing the visual trump the auditory – a marginal singing talent can be compensated by tarty outfits and makeovers.  Food that smells good tastes good.  Food that smells bad, like steamed cauliflower, can’t overcome the bad first impression unless there is enough butter and parmesan cheese. 

 The other remarkable thing was that her clear, liquid singing voice bore no resemblance to her slightly shrill and squawky speaking voice.  Athletes tend to look athletic so it is not too surprising to see LeBron dunk.  And sports physiologists have drooled over Michael Phelps physique, and have poked and prodded it to show that his arms are the perfect length for the butterfly stroke and his narrow and deep chest is ideally proportioned to maximize his lung capacity.  But with singers, how can you know?  Someone should crawl inside this women’s larynx to document its exquisite mechanics, investigate how it interacts with her lungs, because Susan can really belt it out, how it interacts with her eardrums since she is pitch perfect and then figure out how the whole package is connected to her heart – this woman was singing with effective emotion, far beyond what her limited never-been-kissed life experience would suggest.  A previous show had featured someone called Paul Potts who similarly walked onto the stage in an ill-fitting suit with the improbable dream to sing opera.  He explained that he never had any confidence since he was relentlessly teased as a child, perhaps due to his unfortunate name that prompted potty humor derision, or a comparison to the genocidal Cambodian despot Pol Pot.  Or maybe it was his weird snaggle tooth that made you wince when he smiled.  But as soon as he opened his mouth, like Susan, his singing voice bore no relationship to his speaking voice and he just stunned the audience.

 Susan approached the most challenging part of the song – a series of rising notes that would blow out an average person’s larynx.  But she nailed them.  Now the entire audience and the judges were in rhapsodic awe.  She wrinkled up her pug nose and when she nodded in recognition you could see a bald spot around her jagged part.  She finished with a flourish and when the judges gave her an enthusiastic thumbs up, she stamped her feet in excitement and did a fist pump, which set her kimono arms wagging.   The cynical crowd rose to its feet in appreciation of this triumphant underdog. 

 You also knew that you were witness to the first rush of pure, undiluted joy and saw Susan guilelessly exulting in her performance and her dream goal of performing before a live audience.  The news of her performance spread quickly around the world and the press descended on her Scottish village, she was interviewed on the morning news shows, and there is talk about her appearance on Oprah.  Reporters immediately wanted to know if she was going to have a makeover, do something about her grey thinning frizzy hair or whether she had been fielding marriage proposals – all a patronizing and barely designed cruelty targeting her physical appearance.  Who knows how this experience will change this unassuming and modest person, but I did notice that by the time of his last performance on Britain Has Talent, Paul Potts had gotten himself a snappy new tuxedo, his snaggle tooth was gone, most importantly the element of surprise was gone.

Before she sang, the judge had asked why her dream of becoming a singer had not worked out and she simply said, “Well nobody has given me a chance before.”  At the conclusion of her song you are left with the powerful message that nothing deserves to be casually dismissed and that the hidden talents that surely surround us are routinely squandered.  I am thinking of some sort of unassuming frog who is quietly harboring the perfect cure for cancer beneath his moist and delicate skin.  But his swamp is being drained and his muddy pothole is shrinking.  The next pothole is across the new highway that has divided his dwindling habitat.  With a timid croak he tries to hop across the hot tarmac but splat…

The missing words in the following poems are all anagrams (i.e. share the same letters like spot, stop, post, etc.)  The number of dashes indicates the number of letters.   One of the anagrams will rhyme with either the preceding or following line.   Your job is to figure out the words based on the context of the poem.  Scroll down for answers.

Of all our senses, it is the visual that usually ——

 It’s never brains over beauty, the ugly genius complains.

So when the frumpy —— opens her mouth what we expect to hear

 Is an atonal croak instead of a voice that’s pure and clear.

 So close your eyes when you listen, small, feel or taste

 Otherwise we —— ourselves to hidden talents that go to waste.

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Answers:  reigns, singer, resign

I have inherited many gifts from my father, both genetically and by example – reasonable looks (except for my fleshly earlobes), brown hair that just refuses to go grey, kindness, loyalty and commitment to family.  But among my siblings, there is one thing my father and I share exclusively – our inability to carry a tune.  While this would seem to be a minor setback, it was aggravated by the rich musical talents that my mother bequeathed to all 5 of her sons, who all married similarly talented wives, so my father and I emerged as real outliers.  This became painfully apparent during the musical skits for family occasions that my mother created for all of us to perform in – family birthdays and weddings, where you would have the additional stress of performing in front of the bride’s family, all of them total strangers.  The skits would typically involve some sort of recurring refrain, like Alouetta, where you had to sing your two lines over and over again.  Both my father and I would struggle mightily – on the first go-round I would sing too high, and then when it came around to me again, I would overcompensate and sing way too low.  In addition to being off-key, family members would comment that my voice was too “breathy.”

I first became aware of my deficiency in grade school; in fact my first formal rejection of any kind involved music.  There were tryouts for the grade school choir, and I marched in full of confidence since I had been told multiple times, “You Browns are such a musical family.”   The teacher asked me to sing along as she thumped away on the piano.  I still remember the music abruptly stopping and the teaching calling for the next applicant.  I was stunned when I did not make the choir, since with a handful of exceptions – me, Kathy Washburne, Emily Clow, Peggy Huber and Nini Swift – the rest of the class was in.  

The initial sting of rejection became a scab that would not heal as the choir was consistently shown preferential treatment.   During my childhood in the 1960s, everyone rode their bikes and arrived at school early, a scenario that seems totally improbable today.  The school did not want students entering the building before 8 AM, so they set up crossing guards in front of the entrance, and everybody had to wait until the appointed hour.  It was a seething mass of bicycles, except for choir members who would break free from the crowd and gaily sing out, “I have choir practice so I get to cross early.”  The crossing guards always seemed to be the cute boys who would theatrically open the gate and let the singers cross.  Since the choir was almost the entire 8^th grade, I felt like a loser behind the gate with all the younger kids. 

Later that year we had tryouts for the school play, one of the social highlights of the 8^th grade.  The play was a musical called the Thirteen Clocks.  There were limited speaking parts, so most of the class was housed in the chorus.  I was insulted when the cast was posted and saw that I was assigned to the chorus.  I already knew that I could not sing, so this casting meant that I was a worse actor than singer.  I realized that my role in the chorus was really damage control rather than any affirmation of my singing ability.  I was not housed, I was warehoused in the chorus.  I lip synched throughout the play.

 In the meantime, my mother exploited her musical talents to great success.  “I always like to add another string to my bow,” she would say.  She participated in a church choir tour and fulfilled her dream of singing in a cathedral, started a bell choir and a singing group that entertained children and shut-ins, organized and performed in community theater and wrote musical plays for grade-school children.  My brothers had speaking and singing parts in their school plays.  My father and I sat on the sidelines until we were mustered up for family skits.  I was proud of my father’s good humor as he repeatedly humiliated himself in front of an audience.  However, over the years I did notice that he developed a serviceable work-around.  He managed to learn the one tune that my mother always used for her skits, creating some sort of muscle/ear memory so that his singing was not entirely wretched.  I continued to struggle.

As an adult, I tried a different tactic and followed my mother’s footsteps by joining a bell choir.  This seemed like a perfect compromise, since I did not need to sing and was only responsible for four notes.  All I had to do was recognize when to play them.  Fortunately this wasn’t too hard since I was tenacious counter and could usually figure out where we were in the piece, especially since I circled all of my notes in colored coded markers – red for right hand and blue for left.   All the other choir members recognized their notes by sight alone and actually knew the names of the notes.  But this has been a tremendous experience, a great team effort, particularly when we get some applause at the end of a piece.  I was getting just a whiff of the joy and comraderie my mother experienced in her musical life.

But my inability to sing still gnawed at me, in part because I had inherited my mother’s other gift for word play and writing ditties.  For my mother’s 60^th birthday, my brothers and I created new words to the tunes of some of her favorite hymns, Fling Out the Banner, Once to Every Man and Nation, Onward Christian Soldiers, All Things Bright and Beautiful.  However, the best hymn was Rock of Ages, which we changed to “A Jock for the Ages” in honor of her athletic abilities.  The evening was a ripping success; my mother loved the irreverent humor, clever word play and singing, but most of all I think that she loved knowing that her talents would live on. 

I have used “Rock of Ages” many times since then as part of birthday and family celebrations.  It has a nice steady rhythm, a limited range of notes and simple rhyming scheme that make it easy to adapt.  If I really want to slather it on, a birthday verse could go like:

When you joined the human race

The world became a better place,

On this earth no one’s more kind,

You’d give your eyeballs to the blind.

Your loving friendship we hold so dear,

So raise a toast of birthday cheer.

 But singing remained a problem.  You might ask, why not read it instead?  Yes, that would be the easy choice, but the verse would fall flat.  I have found that when sung, lyrics can be infinitely sappier and cornier than anything that is read, so I go ahead and continue to put my finger in the socket and try to sing it.  

All these thoughts were running through my mind as I took one of my brainstorming bicycle rides through the local Forest Preserve.  I thought back to my father who found some success in mastering one song.  “Perhaps I could just focus on Rock of Ages and really learn how to nail just that one tune,” I thought.  I emerged from the Forest Preserve onto the corner of Rte 176 and Waukegan Road and noticed a sign stapled to a telephone phone.  I assumed that it was some tragic plea to recover a lost pet, whose life expectancy would be minimal at this bustling intersection.  Besides, there was no foot traffic here and cars would not be able to read the sign as they whizzed by.  When I looked at the sign more closely, I was startled to see that it was a handwritten sign advertising singing lessons!  I felt that we were made for each other – an atonal singer with a breathy voice and a singing teacher who advertised on a telephone poll.  It was a deus ex machina. 

 I committed the phone number to memory, but then it took me 1 ½ years to work up my courage to call.  I recruited my friend Marion to accompany me, since this whole scenario seemed a bit sketchy; I didn’t want to be the innocent victim lured into an evil trap on the premise of singing lessons.  Sofio answered the phone, and in a Russian accent that could have come out of a James Bond movie, he asked me if I sang in a choir or was a soloist.  I explained that my goals were much more modest – I only wanted a couple of lessons to get some tips on how to sing one song, and one song only.  I would bring the sheet music.   

There was a pause, and Sofio said, “I am professional singer and only teach singers.  I not teach you.”

What? I was indignant.  It never occurred to me that I would receive such a resounding rejection – how could anyone advertising on a telephone pole afford to be picky about his students? 

 While I am sure that I could find others who would let me pay them, I now appreciate the 45 year symmetry bracketing my singing rejections.  Perhaps it’s time to set aside my loftier ambitions and just go with what I’ve got.  A long time ago I bought a sweater, hand made by some hard working Peruvian.  The tag on the sweater said, “The minor irregularities in this garment are part of its handmade charm.”  I took this aphorism to heart as I evaluated my amateur efforts at knitting or sewing, but over time the saying has become the life lesson that my father accepted many years ago.  The irregularities in my quavering, breathy voice will just have to be part of its charm.     

(The missing words in the following poem are all anagrams (i.e. share the same letters like post, stop, spot, etc).  The number of dashes indicates the number of letters.  One of the words will be at the end of a line and this word will rhyme with either the preceding or following line.  Your job is to figure out the missing words.   Scroll down for the anwswers.) 

In my family musical prowess is the talent that ——

 In skits, I struggle to perform the multiple refrains.

 I am not a —— so no matter how hard I try,

 The first verse is too low and the next one too high.

 But over time I —— myself to my atonal voice

 And accept its irregular charm as the logical choice.

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Answers:  reigns, singer, resign

Sunday our carillon bell choir was scheduled to play during the prelude and the offertory.  The prelude is a snap, since this is when the congregation is filing in, and the noise drowns out any mistakes that might be made.  The offertory is another story.  It is drop dead quiet and all eyes are fixated on the choir, standing in the front wearing these ridiculous royal blue robes.  The robes are made out of some sort of dense unbreathable polyester concoction, so that you are essentially trapped in your own escalating body heat as all eyes are upon you.   In addition, the mature age of our ladies’ choir guarantees that at any moment several members could erupt in a torrent of hormone-induced sweat, which cannot be discretely addressed since both hands are gripping the bells.  At one particularly suffocating moment, I likened these robes to the memorable coat of gold paint in the James Bond movie, Goldfinger.  The poor starlet died because they did not leave a space at the base of the spine for the skin to breathe.   

For the offertory, the choir director had selected the piece, “When Jesus Walks.”  Apparently this is an established hymn, but the composer had turned this into a jazz piece, and for the entire 5 months we rehearsed this, I never did hear the tune.  I only had 4 bells to play, the low E and F and the accompanying sharps and flats.  The rhythm was very wacky, abruptly switching from 4/4, to 2/4 to 3/4 and then to something called 5/4.  In general, I am most comfortable with a good stolid march, like Onward Christian Soldiers, so this was bewildering.  Also you were supposed to hit the bells differently at different points in the piece, some rung normally, some muffled into the foam pad on the table, some struck with a mallet, some waved in the air, and this was more than my unmusical mind could process.  And in the first two measures I was the only bell that played, where I was responsible for establishing the pace and rhythm, and in the last measure, I had a little solo run.  So my focus was on the beginning and the end, and I figured that any success over the seven middle pages would be just gravy. 

When I first started playing the bells, I diligently tried to play all my notes, which I carefully circled in different colors on the sheet music.  But as time went on, I realized that I did not have to play all the notes, particularly since I was assigned to the low bells that do not carry the tune (however, in this piece I could have been playing the tune but just didn’t realize it).  I could judiciously delete a few notes here and there without telling anyone, and have a stress free experience.  How does the saying go about the slippery slope of compromise?   “God grant me the wisdom to play the notes I can play, and delete the ones I can’t and the grant me the wisdom to know the difference.”  

However, I got it in my mind that I was going to nail this sucker, and after we played the prelude, I took the sheet music back to the pew while awaiting the offertory.  Through various hymns, sermonettes for youth, announcements, joys and concerns, etc, I tapped out the beat on my knees, using my palms for the ploink and a closed fist for the doink.  In the background I could hear the minister nattering on about how humans were as dumb as sheep that inadvertently walk off cliffs, or walk into a corner and can’t back out.  I was a bit irked to be compared to a dumb sheep, but I guess the take home message was that we are so lucky to have someone like JC be our shepherd.    

Anyway as the sermon ended, I leapt up full of confidence.  I should have stuck to the original plan.  The first and last measures were flawless, but the middle was seriously lacking in gravy.  Ploinks were doinks, and sharps were flats, and I felt about as clueless as a sheep stepping off a cliff.  The conductor was desperately trying to shepherd us through this nightmare and to her credit everyone arrived at the end at the same time for the final chord.  She managed a wan smile and quietly said, “good work ladies, that was a hard piece.”  In the aftermath between services, I was delighted to learn that everyone misplayed notes.  One women said that when she was frantically trying to turn the page, she grabbed several pages by mistake.  This is actually quite easy to do, since we are required to wear cotton white gloves similar to the ones that Mickey Mouse always wears, and consequently lose any tactile sense.  However, this women turned so many pages at once that she ended up briefly playing an entirely different hymn, and then when she realized her mistake could not find her way back home!

The missing words in the following poem are all anagrams (i.e. share the same letters like spot, stop, post, etc.)  The number of dashes indicates the number of latters.  One word is at the end of a line and will rhyme with either the preceding or following line.  Your job is to solve the missing words based on the context of the poems.  Scroll down for the answers. 

Before the —– of the hymn my nerves jangle and quiver,

 But as the conductor raises the baton, its time to stand and deliver.

 I only have four —– to play but this piece has an odd jazzy beat,

 I freeze up and miss so many of them that my defeat is complete.

 I think I hear a smattering of snickers, moans and groans,

 As the congregation winces at the sound of the dissonant —–.

 Am I the culprit, the mill—– around this choir’s neck?

 Hey – the minister insists we’re not perfect so I say “what the heck.”

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Answers:  onset, notes, tones, stone

I have been mistaken for an accomplished musician two times now, with predictably disastrous results.  It is perhaps understandable since I became the family custodian of my mother’s two octave set of brass carillon bells, which she used in her various musical endeavors, including family bell ringing at Christmas time.  I get calls at holiday times, “Oh, Bobbie, can you and Nick come for dinner, and by the way can you bring the bells, we had so much fun when your mother would help us play Christmas Carols.”  I felt like the klutzy kid who always got to play baseball only because he had a back yard big enough for a pick up game and a freezer full of popsicles. 

But I was happy to supply the bells and music, which my mother had carefully color coded so that even the tone deaf could participate.  I had learned enough at our family bell ringing events that I qualified for participation in a real church choir – but only because I brought my own markers to color my music and because I could count out the measures, compensating for my lack of any intuitive feel for the music.  However, I certainly didn’t know the names of the notes, and had only a marginal understanding of musical notation – arpeggios, formatas, martallatos were all beyond me.  But my rudimentary skills were adequate for after dinner entertainment.  In this setting the only goal was get the mildly inebriated “choir” to produce a Christmas Carol that was vaguely recognizable.

 The Wedding

 Mary Washburne’s request was different.  “Bobbie,” she said, “Do you think that you could play the bells at my wedding?”

 While honored at such a request, I quickly pointed out that I was not a musician, but that I could certainly bring the bells and music as long as someone else organized the group.

 “Oh that’s fine,” she said “One of the ushers is a professional musician, and my sister is very musical along with some of the other guests.  If you can just bring the bells up to Michigan, we can take over from there.”

I readily agreed to her plan and we decided that the “pick up” choir would play “Jubilate” as the guests arrived and “Ode to Joy” at the end of the ceremony.  There were a few disturb points that I hoped would fall into place once I got there.  The first was that the wedding was in mid-June in the upper peninsula Michigan, at the absolute peak of bug season.  Ringing bells requires both hands, and thus there would be no opportunity to shoo away the likely hordes of mosquitoes or flies, or both.  Secondly, the ceremony would be performed along a remote lakeshore.  There certainly wouldn’t be any music stands, and I was worried that the music could just blow away.  I had faced this issue years before when some friends and I had attempted to be street musicians with the bells, playing Christmas Carols along State Street in Chicago.  We solved the problem by pinning the music to each other’s backs and then standing in a tight circle so that everyone had a back to read from.  However, Mary envisioned that our choir would stand around a picnic table.

I dutifully arrived with bells and music but was horrified to learn that the musical usher was a last minute no-show, and that I was his secret understudy.  The wedding weekend was so event filled that we had time for only one rehearsal, where we practiced while wearing the mosquito netting that Mary had thoughtfully provided to the entire bell choir.  Since the dense netting made vision difficult, most decided to risk it and go without.  I was also concerned about the eighth notes in Ode to Joy. I had learned from prior bell parties that the slightly faster pace of eighth notes could really throw people off.  I carefully explained to my choir that if anyone missed a note, they must resist temptation to go back and correct the error, since this could be the flick that would send the dominos falling – everyone would be at a different place on the piece with a resulting atonal chaos.   

The wedding day dawned crisp, cloudless and unbelievably, bugless.  What an auspicious start to a wedding.  The bulk of the wedding party was hiking to the wedding site, but I arrived early by car to set out the music on the picnic table using small stones from the beach to keep the music from blowing away.  There were a few elderly people there who had opted out of the hike, and one asked, “Is this a professional bell choir?”

What the hell, “Yes,” I said proudly,  “we are a bell choir all the way from Chicago.”

The wedding party arrived and my intrepid choir assembled, some of them sweating from the hike.  I raised my arms to launch us into Jubilate, and then realized that I had no idea how to move my arms as a conductor.  But I was relieved to see that it didn’t matter since the entire choir was totally engrossed in their music and any arm waving I did was totally superfluous.  I just tried to keep everyone on track by calling out the measures in my best “I mean it” tone.   I judged the piece a success, primarily since we all finished at the same time.  However, I was still nervous about those eighth notes lurking ahead in Ode to Joy.   

We once again assembled at the end of the service, and immediately got off to a very rocky start.  Ode to Joy sounded like some sort of avant-garde piece with a few clashing notes interspersed with total silence and then another little trickle of notes.  The responsibilities of a conductor weighed down upon me – it was time for a “lonely at the top” type of decision.  I gave the universal symbol for abort with multiple slashing  motions across my neck, “Let’s start again,” I hissed.  We rebooted and successfully navigated the eighth notes.  Aside from the uneven rhythm there were two small glitches.  My brother Tim had the simple responsibility of setting down his F major and picking up the F sharp for one note – just one note – which he did not do.  This wrong note was a grievous error, akin to standing in a group of people and letting go with a major fart, which makes everyone wrinkle their nose in disgust.  To his credit, Tim fessed up and avoided an “he who smelt it dealt it scenario.”  Unfortunately his confession consisted of a very audible “Shit” in the middle of the piece.  My sister-in-law Jill was doing beautifully, the picture of concentration, but all of a sudden laid down her bells and just stopped playing.  Jill was 8 ½ months pregnant and her belly hung over the picnic table totally obliterating the last two lines of music; she thought she had finished.    

I breathed a sign of relief when the piece was over, clearly recognizable as Ode to Joy.  When we played the first piece, the wedding party was filing in and the bells were simply background.  But Ode to Joy was the main show, and as I turned around, I realized that everyone was staring at us in various degrees of amused disbelief.  On a scale of “Wow, what a stunning choir” sliding down to “What were they thinking?” I think we fell somewhere to the right of a charmingly quirky performance.

 (The missing words in the following poem are all anagrams, i.e. share the same letters (list post, stop, spot).  The number of dashes indicates the number of letters.  One of the missing words will rhyme with either the previous or following lines.  Your job is to solve for the missing words based on the context of the poem.  The answers are at the very end of the essay.)

Mary’s request to organize a wedding bell choir amongst the bugs and the breeze

 Fills me with anxiety and unease but I respond to her —–.

 After one false start, we play Ode to Joy competently and well

 Until brother Tim has a mental —– and plays the wrong bell.

 It sounds horrible, and he wants to apologize for his grievous mishit.

 Unfortunately, the one word that —– to his mind is an audible !Shit!

 The Funeral

 I applied my lessons learned as we planned a memorial service for my mother.  While the choir consisted of family members with some musical ability, I decided to hire a professional director.  I pulled out Ode to Joy again and assigned the part with the eighth notes to Jay, my most talented cousin.  I put my less musical relatives into damage control positions beyond the range of the melody where errors could be easily absorbed.  After all, this is my designated spot in my church bell choir.  Nancy, the director, showed up for one rehearsal and then informed me that she would not be able to attend the service itself.  Once again, I was thrust into the role of conductor, but I insisted that Nancy at least show me the correct way of moving my arms so that I wouldn’t look like a frantic nestling learning to fly.  Oh, “that’s simple,” said Nancy, “just remember, ceiling to the floor and then out the door,” describing an “L” shaped movement. 

 She took over the rehearsal and whipped the choir in shape.  However, I did notice that Jay went absolutely white-knuckled every time the eighth notes appeared, consistently rushing and jumbling them up.  Jay is an improvisational musician, the kind of person who shows up at a wedding with a harmonica in his pocket so that he can jump up and jam with the dance band.  I realized that these enviable skills were probably not well suited to the rigid demands of a bell choir where you have to play your notes as written; there is absolutely no coloring outside the lines.  I think that is why I have found some musical success with bells, I just simply count and follow the rules and am not distracted by any innate musical talent.  By the end of the hour, our bell choir was sounding pretty decent and Nancy wished us luck and left.  We were so pleased with ourselves that we decided to play Ode to Joy twice, once at the brief family-only graveside event and then immediately following at the formal church service.

 We ran into a major glitch at the graveside.  We were short one set of music, so I was in the ridiculous situation of trying to conduct a choir without music.  Even though I could now move my arms professionally, my choir really only wanted me to call out the measures, which of course I could not do without the sheet music.  I was purely a token presence at this point.  I started the choir, and immediately noticed that some of my ringers had gone astray.  There was no discernable Ode to Joy.  The floundering choir members took it upon themselves to call out the measures, but everyone had a different concept of where we were in the music, particularly my cousin Ned who had inadvertently turned two pages at once and was way ahead of everyone else.  I was literally facing the music, actually an ideal position since I had my back to the astonished mourners standing around the grave.  We limped to a staggered finish line.  Fortunately, it was a very forgiving audience, who commented that my mother would appreciate both the heartfelt attempt to honor her legacy in bells and the outright comical result.

We all headed off to the church, hoping that a bad dress rehearsal would make for a good opening (and closing) night performance.  Once again I stood up in front of my choir.  They intently stared at me in nervous anticipation, and the large congregation was deathly still behind me.  The choir was in my thrall, waiting for my signal to begin.  Truthfully it was an exhilarating experience to have such complete control over a moment.  I raised my hands and the choir picked up the bells in unison, and we began.  Over and over I beautifully choreographed the ceiling to the floor, and out the door movement as I whispered out the measure numbers.  I saw Jay clench his teeth again as we approached the eighth notes, but he hit them just right this time, and on we sailed to a triumphant end.  In that brief moment, the heavens shone down upon us and I was a conductor.

As the minister starts the memorial with a few homilies,

I nervously sit in my pew and murmur silent —–,

This song has to be a success because the service will only be complete 

If the —– of our bell choir are both smooth and sweet.

We start and I notice that Jay’s face —– as we near the tricky measure,

But everything goes well, and our hearts fill with joyous pleasure.

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 Answers: Poem 1:  pleas, lapse, leaps; Poem 2; pleas, peals, pales