"over indulgent and over ambitious egos"
Which come in all shapes and sizes, those who are proficient singers and those who couldn't get two notes to relate to each other
the Singers Club did not follow a singaround policy - we had a strong team of residents and it was those the audience came to hear, so we restricted the large number of floor singers to one song each, always in the first half, just before the interval.
One regular was a woman who literally couldn't hold a tune, invariably forgot the words and selected long, difficult songs.
She made a point of getting there early and sitting in the front row, knitting like M'm Lefarge and apparently taking no interest in the proceedings.
Things got so bad that residents would ask the doorkeeper "is C... in tonight?", before they steeled themselves to come in.
She often had problems establishing the tune and would ask the audience to help her out, and on the regular occasions she forgot words she would stare at the ceiling for long periods until they came back to her - 'Nightmare at The Union Tavern'.
Eventually she stopped coming, but shortly afterwards the organising committee received two letters, one from her, one from her feller, saying they were resigning their membership because of our one-song policy.
Jim Carroll