I think that, since this thread has been reactivated, I should give you guys an update on The-Man-With-The-Tambourine.

Let's see...what to say and how to say it...

He was an elderly man with decided views on things and a disinclination to bathe. He loved to sing hymns and classics like My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean, Home on the Range, and Red River Valley. We all sang along cheerfully with him. He had difficulty finding his starting note so those with guitars helped him find his key and then wrote it on his music for future reference.

There was one time when he got up to sing holding two sheets of paper with his lyrics. On one sheet he had verses to My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean, on the other sheet he had verse to Red River Valley. He thought that he had the lyrics to one song and that he needed to go back and forth, verse by verse, from one sheet to the other. He sang a complete song with a tune that continually morphed from My Bonnie to Red River and back again. I ended up in the kitchen because it is not considered polite to roll around on the floor crying with laughter in front of performers. Others were made of sterner stuff and mamaged to stay in their seats, but without entirely straight faces.

During summer months he sometimes brought produce to song circle and would then present cucumbers to women who sang songs that he liked.

However, as much as we would have accepted and tolerated him as an eccentric, he was also rude and selfish at times. He did not like to have to wait for his turn and often tried to sing two songs at once instead of one. One woman felt that his behaviour to her was inappropriately familiar. He once harangued all the women in the circle who weren't wearing dresses for not dressing as proper women should. He was tediously vocal in his belief that Judgement Day was at hand and all of us who had not accepted Jesus were going to die. People stopped showing up at song circle because they were tired of his rudeness. For this reason it was decided to cancel the song circle for a month. This man was not informed of the decision and has not shown up again. I feel that we were rude to him but that we had had little choice as he was not amenable to changing his ways and his presence was deterring others from coming. I hope we don't have to do this ever again.