The Willow Glen Resident Photograph by Skye Dunlap "Send in the Clowns": The singers, dancers and clowns of the Willows Senior Center wowed the crowd at an annual talent show Friday. Singers, clowns, dancers share the spotlight in annual event Seniors strut their stuff in the Willows Center Talent Show By Eric Johnson When the curtain opened for Bobbie Roggeven, the next-to-last act in the 1998 Willows Talent Show at the senior center of the same name, she was flushed with showbiz excitement. Or else she was blushing. Ms. Roggeven, who had prepared a couple of chestnuts from the late '40s, hit the stage following a song-and-dance set by the Chorus Line Dancers--a set that could only be described by one word: cheesecake. The chorus girls had performed a rather risqué little number, a song called "If You're Good to Mama," which included the line, "spice it up for mama, and she'll get hot for you." They had demonstrated the sentimennt by turning coyly in their rhinestone-studded miniskirts and doing an old-fashioned booty-shake while cuddling their feather boas suggestively. The crowd was still whistling and cat-calling when the curtain parted for Roggeven. "I don't know how I'm going to follow that act!" she laughed, echoing a line that one of the chorus girls had uttered when they took the stage 20 minutes earlier following a rousing set by the Iola Williams Choir. Roggeven succeeded in winning the crowd over by belting out soulful renditions of "Is You Is or Is You Ain't My Baby" and "How Come You Do Me (Like You Do-Do-Do)?" Of course, the Willows was not a particularly tough room (to use the showbiz lingo). The 100 or so folks in the audience, who'd come in from the balmiest of autumn afternoons, had been beaming since singing "Happy Birthday" at the beginning of the program to MC and co-director Al Chun. Chun spent the afternoon doing battle with the stage curtain, which threatened to knock him over between every act. It didn't matter whether he was performing a clever bit of comedy or having a slightly clumsy day-- the crowd loved it. The audience had enjoyed the singing of Sandy Menke, Marguerite Berry and Peggy Lee, the poetry of William Peckham, and a waltz by Max Bazovsky and Hazel Woodward. Piano solos by June Hebbe and duets by Maureen D'Atillo and Rosemary Busch couldn't have gotten bigger applause if they'd been played by Ferrante & Teicher or Liberace. Clearly, many of the performers had spent the better parts of their lifetimes honing the talents they put on display Friday. Not so, however, for the so-called Willows Spotlighters, whose clown act was so bad it was great. In between almost indecipherable choruses of "Be a Clown," the Spotlighters interrupted their "singing" with absolute cornball shtick. They did the pie-in-the-face shtick, the tightrope-on-the-floor shtick, the squish-the-invisible-dancing-bug shtick, and the worst rabbit-in-the-hat-trick shtick ever performed. Like everything else in the two-hour extravaganza, it was fabulous. [ Back to Contents Page | Willow Glen Resident Home Page | Archives ] This article appeared in the Willow Glen Resident, November 25, 1998. ©1998 Metro Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.