Our good friends, Dan and the Seabillies, were performing their lively Celtic music at Porter’s last weekend and we popped in to have a great dinner and enjoy their energy.
There are so many great places around town where you can get a good meal and listen to some local entertainment, and each time we do it we ask ourselves why we don’t do it more often.
Dan plays just about anything you can ask for and to please his predominately Baby Boomer crowd he switches from the Rankins, to Creedance Clearwater, or from Bob Dylan to Ian and Sylvia. It’s a lot like being able to plunk a coin into the juke box and up pops another familiar tune.
When the band does Don McLean’s ‘Bye Bye Miss American Pie’ we are all encouraged to sing along and we do, and each chorus gets louder as we recall the day the music died.
The evening is going well until someone sends up a request for Puff the Magic Dragon.
Well why not? We’re in a sing-along mode now so let’s give that old children’s song a go.
How many times have we sung that in the nursery to our children or in the car as Peter, Paul and Mary sang along with us?
But soon it is evident that, while we all know the chorus, we don’t all remember all the words.
We all knew the boy’s name was Jacky Paper and we knew he loved that rascal Puff, but in between there was a lot of humming as the band waited for the audience to supply the next line and the audience waited for the band to lead us into the next verse.
Dan was lost in the Land of Honalee and when he got to the end he belted out “Then Puff forgot his name!”
We all knew that was wrong but we broke up laughing because most of us in the room could identify with a 60, 70, or 500-year-old dragon who might forget his name or at least the names of the dragons walking toward him on the street. It seemed to be a new, fitting ending to that old song.
It reminded me of the senior’s Serenity Prayer: “God give me the serenity to forget the people I never liked anyway, the good fortune to remember the ones that I do, and the eyesight to tell the difference.”
If we were all honest, we would admit we sing our own versions to our favorite songs and we are quite surprised at time to find that the real lyrics are quite different from we have sung for years.
But if we’re singing in the car or the shower, we’re happy.
The song is all about a little boy who grows up and loses interest in his toys and moves on, leaving the dragon lonely and depressed and then Puff slips into his cave. Come to think of it, maybe this wasn’t such a great bedtime song to be singing to our kids.
A better ending for the kids today would include a line that, while Puff was lonely, he had an Xbox One and wifi in his cave so he was just fine.
So find a dragon, keep a look-out on his gigantic tail, sing at the top of your voice and all the pirate ships will steer clear.
At least that’s what McGregor says.