Joe, On the basis of forty years of being camp counselor, teacher, artist-in-ed...oh yeah, and parent: 1) Context and tone matter a lot. And I'm not sure we can second-guess your sense of how the kids, as a group, were taking the song or how you were delivering it. From what I've read here, you could have been (and, given your experience, probably were) doing something that really meshed with kids' senses of humor and was appropriate.

On the other hand, purely as material "Our House" is on the edge. I've seen kids' performers do that sort of stuff with an insensitivity to its potential scariness that appalled me. Even us geezers have to be careful about indulging our own immaturity around kids for whom we are responsible. But if you weren't being careful and concerned, you'd never have started this thead in the first place, no ? So...

2) What no performer ever knows is what innocently delivered line may really hit an audience member hard. A kid who had a godawful nightmare the night before, or one stoked with anxieties because of family issues he/she may not even be consciously in touch with (I was one such), may go off like a fire alarm. You're fortunate if you ever find out you've been blindsided that way because you may be able to put it right. Sometimes the kid tells a family member who says nothing. Sometimes the kid tells no one.

This can happen with adults, too. I once played a few bars of "Hatikvah" as a very sober by-the-way at a house concert. An audience member became violently hysterical. She was a concentration-camp survivor. Not only did I not know, neither did anyone else there until that moment.

Any performer is possessed of a kind of arrogance. We give ourselves the right to intrude on others' lives. And our audiences extend that right to us. But sometimes neither of us knows the consequences in advance. And we wind up with the unsought burden of trying to put things right.

Sometimes you just make an innocent mistake.

3) But what I've seen no one else address here is the question of whether you are dealing with a parent on a power trip. Making an issue of something (even in confidence) as a way of putting oneself in a position of some power vis a vis a staff member - or more likely the program director - is stereotypically common in camp programs. If you are dealing with a new director who is feeling her way on one hand, and with an "old guard" parent on the other, that may be what is going on. The newness of the director suggests to me that such a dynamic may be at work. No slight to the director intended. It can be a lot like kids testing a new teacher. On a few occasions when I've been a program director, I've felt a lot as though I was back in a September classroom drawing lines... and not for the kids!

George ::-.--O