I really appreciate the suggestions 🙂 I ended up with mostly patriotic songs, as everybody had at least heard most of those before. I threw in some classic Girl Scout songs but the girls hated those—except the gross camp songs. And leader #1 had apparently decreed last week (when I was out due to a migraine) that we couldn’t sing about greasy, grimy gopher guts or anything similar to that. There were some pieces from musicals (classics and Disney) and a few other randomly chosen songs. They seemed to like the ones from the musicals best. Attempts at rounds were disastrous. We won’t talk about trying to teach them the three-part version of Dona Nobis Pacem—I should have known that was a bad idea by the reaction of the parents. “Is that Italian? What is that? Some kinda Cathlik stuff?” They seemed most enthusiastic about “This Land is Your Land,” “Do Re Mi” and “My Favorite Things.”
After the meeting, one of the parents came up to me and started expounding on the importance of picking songs from the ’20s to ’40s so that the people who are actually at the assisted living home would like them. And he wanted me to teach the girls Tom Lehrer songs. While that’s all well and good, suggestions received after the one and only practice aren’t very helpful. I don’t know most of the songs he was mentioning, and I’m 99.9% sure none of the girls (other than his daughter) have heard them, either. Nor was he interested in teaching the girls these songs, it was “just a suggestion.” Strongly worded to make it seem like I’m an idiot not to have already done what he suggested.
The Daisies (both five years old) largely stood around and looked cute and somewhat puzzled. It’s their forte. They don’t come from musical families and neither of them can read yet, so they didn’t really learn much. I expected they’d know “Kum Ba Yah” (leader #2’s addition to the song list) but nope, not that one either. That’s okay, they’re really good at the looking cute part.
One of the Juniors (twelve years old) pitched a bit of an attention-getting tantrum because she doesn’t like her voice. It was one of those “I’m going to insult myself so you will praise me and tell me I’m wrong” things. I don’t like that kind of manipulation. My answer was, “Well, I think you have a perfectly nice voice. We’d like you to sing with us. I won’t force you to do this if you don’t want to, though, so it’s entirely up to you.” And then we moved on. I’m not sure that’s the official Girl Scout way to handle such things, but I know this kid, and she isn’t having confidence problems.
