Last month we had our biggest crowd ever; there was almost no room for us.  This month it was down a little from that.  There seems to be a lot of people sick right now.  But we had a great time.  Just about all our regulars showed, and we had at least two new faces.  There seemed to be less staff on duty, they may have been out sick too.  We also had some bad weather moving in.  Short staff makes for a smaller crowd; they get folks to bed earlier.

            We added a couple of new songs to the set, I am still not where I wanted to be with new music, but we are making progress.  I really wanted to have almost an entire new set for the start of this year, but we just haven't put the time in to do that.  Finding material we like is half the battle, the other half is getting together to practice.  Most of the blame is to lay with me; I'm the one that has to learn the guitar part for it.  I'm sure it will all work out.  The songs we have been doing from the beginning seem to hold a lot of appeal with the residents and some songs we have to do every month or they won't let us leave!

            This was just a good month with a lot of interaction with the crowd, I had all new jokes this month, and they went over great.  On the jokes, I have found that at least two good story jokes work well, very many more than that and people seem to loose interest.

 Lots of one liners or short jokes between a few songs help.  If people start to dose off it is joke time.  I like to have about 10 or 12 jokes with me.  I just write the punch line on a sheet of paper and put it in the back of our song book, when it is time for a joke; I just flip to the back. You need to know the joke well enough to tell it without reading it if you can.  You might get by with singing from a sheet of music (Lord knows I do), but you will not get by reading jokes…

A story joke will take a few minutes to tell, maybe about the length of one song, keep it as animated as you can that really helps.  And keep it simple, I love jokes you have to think about, but that is not what you want in this situation, just simple funny jokes.  I get most of mine off the internet; just do a Google for clean jokes.  Or clean Christian Jokes, it will not take you very long to come up with a few.  I use my wife as a test, if she gets the joke, everyone will! Sorry honey…