5.026 performance

Wednesday 12/27/2023

Today was the day for the Channing House Musical Potpourri, at 7pm in the lobby. This was the conception of Mary R, chorus director. She roped me into it when she found out I was playing the guitar again.

I did the laundry; I went for a short walk and picked up a prescription at CVS, and I put in about 3 hours getting together a new Advanced Health Care Directive and some other end of life type papers. But mostly, I fiddled around killing time until 5, when I went down for an early supper, and to put out the sound system for the lobby so we’d have a mic.

Then back to my room to fidget until 6:30 when I took the guitar down and joined the other musicians setting up. I was surprised how nice this time was, just hanging out with musicians as they tune up and get ready. Here’s a snatch of video to show the room.

Here was the program, which Mary had set up in 7-minute segments: Sing-A-Long with Arlene (pianist, in the santa hat); Baroque Trio (Lou on recorder, Alice on cello, Kay on flute, in the center of the video); piano and clarinet duet by John and Francis; Sandy doing a reading from a story by Truman Capote; a cello/flute duet; then little ol’ Moi doing two songs on guitar; and the Jazzy Trio, which is Arlene, Stew and Kay again. Jerry video’d the whole show, and I expect he will give me a clip of my performance which I may share later on.

So, David, how did it go? Well you know, it went very very well indeed. I didn’t make any musical screwups, and the audience were smiling and singing along. And I got probably the biggest hand of the night. Afterward several people came up to me to congratulate me and say they enjoyed it. Part of that might have been just surprise, since I have never done any public performance of any kind around here, and suddenly I’m singing and playing the guitar in front of a crowd. But they seemed sincerely impressed.