How like a winter has this quarter been, like a winter.* It’s been unseasonably cold and has gone on for too long. Taxes loomed over everything, as always until one gets them done, making January even more dreary than it already is. God bless the Capricorns, they can’t help it.

I wasn’t especially excited about our OK Chorale/All Present St Patrick’s Day concert at the end of this quarter. The OK Chorale struggled with a lot of new music, which always comes together in the end except for the times when it doesn’t. On the All Present side of things, we had whittled down our Irish songs until there weren’t that many left. The list was further eroded by the fact that the Ukuleles could only play two of them, one of which I nixed, “When Irish Eyes are Smiling,” because I’m sick of it. I christened “Bill Bailey” an Irish song and added it to “Harrigan.” Then there were two.

Ginger, one of our All Present regulars and a fellow piano teacher, lobbied hard to put “When Irish Eyes are Smiling” back in. Both she and her husband have the Irish in them and she felt there wasn’t enough of it in the program. Particularly “When Irish etc”. She pointed out that everyone knew it; couldn’t we just tack it on to the last sing-a-long song? So I had an extra song sheet printed especially and everyone in the audience got a song packet and a sheet just so we could sing about Irish eyes.

I was planning to smile a lot and get through the concert. Instead it was a roaring success and I got teary during all the sentimental songs. “When Irish Eyes are Smiling” rose through the hall, getting louder and more relaxed and rowdy every time we came round to the chorus. You could almost imagine everyone was in their cups it was so fulsome. I sat playing the accompaniment with tears pooling in my eyes.

What was making me emotional was not so much the song, which I loathe, but the fact that everyone was singing together. It’s like when we sing “Joy to the World” at Christmas. Everyone knows it, everyone sings it and something happens that threads us back into the past and connects us to humanity.  Even if it isn’t part of our culture, as with the Filipina in All Present, people are singing together.  It strips away our pretensions and worries. It links us to each other if not in memory or culture, in the heartbeat of rhythm and the voice of melody.

The audience rocked out to “Hey Good Lookin’.” For my money, this song should be sung at every sing-a-long, everywhere, all the time. I have an evangelical fervor about it because I am a recent convert. When the Ukulele band introduced it I called it “that sexual harassment song.” It was pointed out to me that it’s a unisex song. If I thought a man was asking a woman what she’s got cooking and that meant a woman’s place was in the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant, that was my problem. Anyone could be in that kitchen. And the song wasn’t about cooking in the kitchen at all. Madame Metaphor had missed it completely. In any case, it is the rowdiest, catchiest, most fun-loving, toe tapping song imaginable for group singing.

The highlight of the whole concert for me was when Ben sang. Ben is a slight, thin man who is currently living with Parkinsons. He asked The Other Susan to stand with him when he sang. He stood unsteadily and his hands shook as they held his music.  Then he sang. What comes out of Ben when he sings is vibrant and strong, a high ethereal tenor. He sang the verses of “Wimoweh.” Then he smiled his wonderful smile, full of sweetness, relief that he had gotten through it and surprise that the ovation was so stunning.

After the concert he told me, “I’ve waited 50 years to do that.”

“Oh, Benny!” I said and hugged him.

Apparently Ben has lived with his wondrous instrument and for reasons I can’t fathom, has never been given the opportunity to use it. He’s auditioned for choirs and he has asked to sing in churches. Nothing. I don’t understand this. Maybe someone had parents who bribed directors into letting their little Brittney Spears Wanna Be get in and there wasn’t room for someone with real talent. There seems to be a lot of that going around. Or I could put it down to the snobbery of some churches. It’s inexcusable.

I was proud to put Ben on the promotional posters as the featured soloist at our little concert.  I am already thinking about what he might do next. One day Parkinsons will take his voice. I want to give him lots of chances to share it before that happens.

Ben

* one of the Chorale songs was a setting of Shakespeare sonnet # 97 “How like a winter has my absence been.”