Song parody to “It’s a Gift to be Simple

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…