Plum.

December 21, 2009 by Ro.

Moderately Bright Four finishes a whirlwind of holiday festivity beginning with a perky show at the Morris View Adult Day Care Center right before Thanksgiving and ending on December 20 with a performance at Morris Choral Society’s annual Christmas concert as guest vocalists. In between we sing at the Sacred Bean Coffeehouse for an all-Christmas show, at the Interfaith Thanksgiving Service, at the Temple Hatikvah Chanukah dance, at the menorah lighting in Long Valley, and at Ro’s tree-trimming Soupfest. We are busy bees indeed.

All of this takes lots of rehearsal and many snacks, supplied generously by the fabulous and kind-hearted Brenda.

We succeed in building our holiday repertoire to a full hour of material, adding this year “Throw the Yule Log on, Uncle John,” “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year,” and “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy,” which has only one word: plum. Somehow we manage to get it wrong in rehearsal, substituting “fig,” “grape,” “prune” and other monosyllabic fruits. We think we are riotously funny and frequently wind up twitching on the floor, snorting merrily.

Morris Choral Society requests that we banter a bit with the audience, so Ro appoints herself the schtick master (she likes the word “schticksa”) even though this costs her many hours of sleep and anxiety planning and rehearsing her witty remarks. Many of these jokes are at poor Jeff’s expense, mostly because he doesn’t mind, but also because he is an easy target. [Go back to our bio and reread the part about Jeff being raised in a barn, and you’ll see why the stuff just writes itself.]

Ro is horrified to find out just before the show that Jeff’s parents will be in the audience, and she is concerned how they will react to these attacks on their son. Fortunately, they turn out to be good sports, just like Jeff. His mother even states, “That’s OK. He was born with a ‘Kick me’ sign on his back.”

The best part of the show is the wonderful audience, who seem to like Moderately Bright Four quite a bit. From their generous applause to their laughter at Ro’s jokes to their sighs at the end of songs like “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” they give us the support we need not to melt into four little pools of stage fright in front of their very eyes. It is a wonderful day, followed by a raucous after-party at Ro’s where we even sing “M-O-T-H-E-R” to Jeff’s mother. The whole day is a huge success.

In fact, 2009 as a whole is a huge success for Moderately Bright Four, and we are looking forward to more musical merriment and mayhem in the New Year!

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