Monday, January 4, 2010

Funny or NOT

Since the evening after Christmas, I’ve been a little concerned about the next generation, the one that follows mine. That evening my sisters, cousins, and I presented “A Musical History of the Bolly Girls” a true farce about our childhood and teen years.

The five of us had worked for about three months preparing a singing/dancing event to entertain our daughters and granddaughters at our annual Bolly girls party. None of us carry the name of our grandfather, John Bolly, but we’ve always been proud to call ourselves Bolly girls. We thought the younger ones should know all about being a Bolly girl, so we wrote and presented what we thought was a musical comedy of our life on the hill in old South Memphis.

To the tune of “The Crawdad Song,” We sang about Grandma and our mothers, and then about us.
Five in all, we had a ball, Honey, baby mine.

Grandpa brought home from the cemetery, Honey,
Loads of ribbons in colors bright, Babe.
We sewed those ribbons and made some skirts,
Worn with pride. We were a sight! Honey, baby, mine

Our audience sat silently watching as we sang about Doris’s pet duck that was eaten by Mrs. Stackhouse and about our friends and the spanks we got. I never heard a snicker, and we thought we were doing funny stuff. Couldn‘t figure out why they weren’t laughing, or groaning, or something.

Orma’s dream was to dance on stage,
But a concussion stopped that at an early age,

We wore our daddy’s shirts; we wore our daddy’s ties.

Then she held a baton up high,
Leading on the marching band,

For pots and pans and dirty dishes,
And for your hands and for your face.

When we sang, “Grandma’s Lye Soap” in the most off-key, raucous voices we could muster, no response. But by then the youngest granddaughters were getting into the spirit and wore big smiles as they stared at us.

By the time we got to “Jesus Loves Me,” I was seeing more smiles. Almost everybody sang with us on that one.

Then:
Sunday morning in an old paneled truck, Honey,
We’d head to church, holding our noses, Babe.
During the week Grandpa used the truck
Hauling chicken manure to make his compost hot,
Honey, baby mine.

A few smiles, but mostly silence brought us to the finale.

We leave you now with a taste of just
The way we were. You’ll remember I trust,
Honey, baby mine.

While quickly transforming ourselves from 1950s teens into current dancing queens, we heard from the other room the uproarious laughter we had hoped for. They must have been entertaining each other.

You can dance, you can jive
Having the time of your life

Thanks to ABBA we ended on a high note with most of the granddaughters singing with us.

We bowed and it was all over. Not one wave of applause in the silence that followed. Nobody said much about our great performance. What a disappointment! We had so hoped they would love the show. What I heard was, “I was amazed you could remember all that and had the stamina to do it."

Finally, a week later, my daughter said they all really enjoyed our performance, but didn’t know if they should laugh or clap or what. They didn’t want to hurt our feelings. I would have thought seeing five grandmotherly women cavorting about, singing the hilarious lyrics I wrote . . .

Oh, that’s it! What a blow to the ego! I’m not a funny writer. And we had thought seeing old ladies in ribbon skirts, galloping through the house on beanpole horses would have been so funny nobody could keep from laughing.

The real concern is that our kids have forgotten how to play and have fun. I wonder if they ever get so tickled they just can’t stop laughing. I know our mothers did. And we did too, again and again, when we practiced that farce. Maybe funny these days is different. It might have to be on a screen of some kind or be accompanied by a laugh track to let people know it’s funny.

My assignment for the new year is to find out what’s funny.

2 comments:

Beth Dotson Brown said...

Maybe the real story, or play, for you to write is the broader story of doing the performance for your family, worrying they don't know how to have fun, then convincing them to be in a play so they see how much joy it can bring to them and their audience.I had a big smile on my face as I looked at your photos so I feel sure I would have laughed!

Christi Atherton said...

Grace, I love it!! And I say, keep it up!