18? Where are you living? Nice parody, though.

I'll post here because I figure you'll see it faster, Phil. Mari and I performed your "Difficult Bits" tonight. It went quite well. I played guitar while Mari negotiated that tongue-twister you wrote. Since there are a lot of writers and teachers in our little group, they appreciated the lesson. Afterwards, one guy who had his kid with him said, "Can we count this for class credit?" It's not easy to do, pronunciation is crucial. Fortunately, Mari is very good at that, and we took it slow. (She's going to do Tom Lehrer's Christmas Carol next month). We also performed "Both Rides Now", and got comment like "Joni Mitchell is turning over in her grave" "She's not dead yet" "This version you did will kill her" etc. Both songs got laughs and enthusiastic applause. We also plugged the site again. We like doing this. We may select our faves from everybody, record them all without a lot of production and post them somewhere. Maybe we could send it to Chuckie.

Thanks, Rick: must admit, I've not done TL's Christmas Carol for a few years now - I think enunciation is important in that one, and it's not exactly my forté ("Drag out the Dickens" is kind of easy to slur). I like the idea of recordings, but I don't think Chucky has the bandwidth available for mp3 hosting, which is why the performances always have to be links to somewhere else: my site with MP3s on has gone over its bandwidth limit a few times recently, too :-( But it does mean that quite a few people are interested, which is good :-)

Neminem - legal age of drinking is 18 over here (in the UK)

Phil, I had a lot of fun singing "Difficult Bits" the other night! Several people came up and told me how funny that they thought it was (and how much they hate it when apostrophes are used incorrectly). I'll be sure to watch the enunciation on TL's "CC," which would be helped by not drinking beer beforehand! By the way, I have a strange recollection of a Phil Alexander in L.A. who was a musician... think he played oboe... No, it can't be... Were you ever...

Nope, Mari, wasn't me: I've not been to LA (or even America, yet), and I've certainly never played the oboe in public (whoever called it "the ill wind that nobody blows good" probably heard me practising)