The OK Chorale lost one of our long time singers three days ago. Quite unexpectedly, Hal, our resident funnyman, died in his sleep. He was cheeky, irreverent, and a reliable bass with a lovely voice. When I got the news, I went trawling through my blog posts to find the ones he had starred in.  Read the Rest…

There’s almost nothing I like better than sleuthing out a new song.  This week, as it continues to be World War II at my house, the latter interest has intersected with the former.  Just as one gets used to seeing the same news footage of D-Day, of the Zyklon-B can, and of the liberation of  Read the Rest…

The All Present/OK Chorale Holiday Concert and Cookie Exchange took place over the weekend.  The actual Cookie Exchange was demoted to Cookie Potluck as in the end no one had the stomach for the politics of a formal cookie exchange. “Whose idea was this cookie exchange anyway?” asked Susan, my lovely assistant with All Present  Read the Rest…

It’s been two weeks since I’ve written.  If you follow my blog, I bet you thought I was reading David Copperfield all this time. Not even close. I haven’t begun to look for my copy of it yet. No, I’ve been Doing Christmas.  I tried making divinity and ended up with vanilla soup.  Only then  Read the Rest…

All Present, a song circle for people living with ESML (Early Stage Memory Loss) is in its second quarter. Almost everyone from the spring returned. It’s a peculiar feature of this group that if I hadn’t been told every one of these singers had some form of dementia, I wouldn’t have known. Some of them  Read the Rest…

About 15 years ago there was a massive controversy in The OK Chorale involving a camp song called “The Titanic.” Something similar has come up and again it involves camp songs. Who would have thought that camp songs– camp songs!—would exercise so many people? I have finally realized that what most people call camp songs are  Read the Rest…

All Present Song Circle knows so many songs that we can’t get through them all in a session so last week we started at the back of the song sheets.  That was a bit of a mistake in that the sheets are confusing enough without having to work through them backwards.  The singers have a  Read the Rest…

When you’re self-employed your income is more directly connected to your initiative than is someone’s with a contract or tenure. There can be great satisfaction in having control over your own hustle, or marketing in today’s more genteel parlance.  I’m not used to having offers drop into my lap unconnected to the aforementioned hustle, but  Read the Rest…

It’s Christmas Eve (morning).  There are streaks of rose madder in the sky.  All is calm and bright before The Onslaught of Holiday.  This morning I read Robert Browning’s (very) long poem “Christmas Eve.”  A dream is set off by the poet going into a dreary church service on Christmas Eve, falling asleep during the  Read the Rest…

Who couldn’t like Robbie Burns? Well, the British, I suppose.  And he didn’t wear well with the Edinburgh Scots.  When I turned the page from William Blake in my trek through The Norton Anthology of English Literature, there was Robert Burns with all his apostrophes.  After I got used to the a’s, the whas and  Read the Rest…