The Songs

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.