Poagao's Journal

Absolutely Not Your Monkey

Dec 14 2015

Retirement community gig

Yesterday afternoon I met up with Chenbl and his fellow floutists at the Danshui MRT. We’ve done a couple of shows in the past with them on flute and me on trumpet; somehow word got out, and a retirement community out there invited us to play for their residents. One of their people met us at the station and took us up the hillside, past Tamkang University, to the hillside establishment. The lobby was a mixture of hotel and hospital, flanked by an atrium with large windows facing the ocean and the setting sun.

We got ready and warmed up in the place’s library, and I sat next to the side door of the small stage while the other groups played old Mandarin and Minnan favorites to the large group of elderly people, many in wheelchairs, caregivers feeding them small pieces of cake by hand. The retirees hummed and even sang along to the old songs; it was actually kind of touching.

renfuThough our performance went well, musically speaking, the people handling the technical part of the event weren’t quite with the program, cutting off “Rose Rose I love You” halfway through the song. Then the MC said “And next is ‘Summertime’, a song frequently played at funerals!” Chenbl and I both stared in horror as he said this, but the MC seemed to think it was perfectly ok, so we shrugged and kept playing. Hopefully our rendition of the song managed to avoid any kind of funereal intimations.

After the show, the audience trickled out slowly, back to their games of chess and mahjong in the building’s atrium. A couple of them told me they really enjoyed the show, which was nice. We took a bus back down the hill, and a long subway ride back to the city.

 

posted by Poagao at 12:00 pm  

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