[From the Ontario District's newsletter, The Trillium, issue 59-03, July - September, 2005 , Waldo Redekop, editor.]
[Taken from the Barrie Chapter’s Off The Risers, July-August, 2005, Ted McAlpine editor.]

Life after barbershopping

— A case for membership retention

Musings by Roy Keys

Most male singers conk out 75 or so. Whereas females can hang in until about 77. After three hours or so on the risers, he has most of the two songs they are working on. That’s because they haven’t started the second one yet.

When it is finally time to dismantle the risers, he cannot move. He’s frozen stiff and they have to remove him in a straight up position, like an icicle.

He does not yet decide it is time to hang up his pitch pipe, but his chorus director makes the decision for him. Most directors are very thoughtful that way.

So, he goes home to his long-suffering wife (she has arthritis too) but she is not rigid thanks to years of mopping floors, washing walls, painting porches and other jobs for which she has a natural talent, and this keeps her supple, if not nimble.

It is at this juncture that he realizes the he has been singing for the poor and needy most of his life and discovers that he is now poor and needy and had never worked hard enough to support his wife and children.

At last he must get a job. Something that draws in about $95,000 or so. But where? He has no idea of where to look and that is where his wife comes in. Not to tell him where to look, but where not to look.

He has noticed that a lot of automobile assembly plants are for sale and it strikes him that here there are some golden opportunities staring him in the face. And he’ll wish, for once, that he had listened to his wife who told him why they were for sale in the first place.

When he was a kid there was the Big Three auto makers, then the Big Four and then the Big 39 or so. You remember the fourth one was the Kaiser car. What ever happened to him? He changed the spelling of his name to Kayser and started a dance band.

Another business to avoid is tailoring. He may think that all you have to do is find a little shack in the back alley, pick up some old Singers (sewing machines, not basses), train a few six- or seven-year-old school drop outs and you’re in business.

He doesn’t realize that the best suit he ever wore was his chorus uniform and he is about to re-invent the Nehru jacket or the Zoot suit and go broke in the first week. He should know that people today dress casual, even to the office on Friday, and nobody wants to wear a uniform anymore.

The third thing to avoid is politics. Any 75-year-old who can learn the words and music to two songs in one year is too advanced for politics. Most politicians went to college where they paid their dues but didn’t pay attention. They did, however, develop a penchant for speaking into microphones.

They cannot walk past a mic without saying something off the cuff. I heard of one politician who was sent to a deserted music hall to do a feasibility study. On stage was the old dead mic, covered in dust and cobwebs which he couldn’t resist. He talked for 45 minutes before realizing that the hall was empty. He had said nothing intelligent anyway so it wasn’t wasted. He also didn’t know what “feasibility” meant.

My suggestion to the 75-year-old singer is to stay on the risers until he becomes stiff again and hope they will carry him out for the last time horizontally.  k