By Jim Hagarty
2013
You learn something new every day. Please take note. The next time you sing for the residents of a nursing home, do not, I repeat, do not sing a fun song called Seven Old Ladies. Because everyone’s definition of fun is different, I guess. Up to that point, I was doing fantastically well and the audience loved me more than their own sons and daughters, several of whom were in the audience. However, as I sang Seven Old Ladies – a little ditty about seven unmarried and aged females who get stuck in a public washroom – people started looking at me as though I was slaying a box of kittens with a dull butcher knife. And there was no getting them back after that. I am setting fire to the lyric sheet as we speak. Another quirk of nursing home performances shows itself with other song choices. You strike off into a song, then realize that someone in the song is going to die before it ends. Such as Green Green Grass of Home. “As they lay me, ‘neath the green green grass of home.” I don’t know how it happens, but a nursing home singer who has not come properly prepared with a carefully thought out song list, just naturally seems to drift to songs involving dying. And die the singer will before he is finished as most of the songs he dreams up off the top of his head are as gloomy as a late November evening. The only appropriate word to use to describe the experience is, “Aaaargh!”
