LOVE & OTHER AFFLICTIONS

Confessions of a Comic Singer

I must confess I love making people laugh, and since my muse comes in the forms of visual images and musical hooks, the two came together as a hybrid comic-singer.  But why this strange combination of comedy and song? Well.... I think it’s because when I was a kid, I was very small. This experience was horrific for me and in adulthood became the source of a major behavior problem.  I would burst out into song at the most inopportune moments; jury duty, gynecological exams, and job interviews.  I couldn’t stop myself.  At first I thought I was channeling the spirits of Rogers and Hammerstein, but as the content of the songs grew more confrontational and episodes grew more frequent, I knew I had to take action.  I found a site on the Internet called www.blameyourself-itscheaper.com where I typed in my symptoms of uncontrollable song. The site analyzed my information and came back with this.  I was holding repressed, terrorized, childhood memories of being forced to watch The Lawrence Welk Show.  For those of you who were born after the unsuccessful assassination attempts on our Presidents, The Lawrence Welk Show was the parental MTV of its day; the day when there was the threat of the cold war and the threat that Tuna Touchdown Casserole had great nutritional value. To get over this past trauma and present fear that the show might still be in syndication, I found a music sensitive therapist.  He prescribed one hour of accordion music a day, plus dance therapy, which included the Polka.   I’m in recovery, thank God, and have learned to recognize when these repressed emotional memories are triggered and to use them.  I’ve put them into songs and they range from anything and everything from hating one’s job, “Donde Esta Mi Chequi” to “The Bitch Of Bitterness”.  They and many more are on my CD, LOVE AND OTHER AFFLICTIONS.   To find out more about me, to stimulate the economy and to buy it, go to www.elizabethgray.com.

 

Elizabeth Gray