When Monday, Dec 30th 7:30PM ET

Where: https://youtube.com/live/_r5yQaqplgs?feature=share  

Who gets 10%: https://www.thehome.org Home For Little Wanderers - To help children and their families build permanent, positive change

http://paypal.me/vancevancevance or https://venmo.com/vancevancevance or VanceFunder P.O. Box 17, Arlington, MA 02476

GIG OF NOTE:

1/11 *CAMBRIDGE, MA - CLUB PASSIM 2 SHOWS* https://www.passim.org/live-music/events/vance-gilbert/ - about 10 tix left for one, 15 for the other

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*PRIVATE COACHING AVAILABLE - Contact me (vance@vancegilbert.com) for songwriting, performance, and voice coaching.*

**CUSTOM SONGS - Expensive, but sure, you want one about you or your family or something.**

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CHARLOTTE ELLNER

“Is Vance staying for dinner or for a few weeks?” is all she’d usually ask of her son, my bestie Ken as we played guitars or just hung out. Just let her know. She’d food shop appropriately. My thank you was usually met with walking away.

I came home from college Christmastime freshman year to our house up for sheriff’s sale. Parents had scattered to Maryland and Philly, but I still had keys, so I found linens and towels and bundled up in the rear bedroom. There was no electricity. Charlotte sent Ken to go get me. I wouldn’t budge. Ken crawled in beside me with our coats and his striped ski hat and we kept warm like that. “My mom says you have to come over to us”, Ken said in the morning.

His house is where I landed when other living situations wore out. Four years homeless put me on countless couches, guest rooms and floors. The backroom of a verbally abusive Godmother who finally said to teetotaling-from-day-one-me: “You should go stay with your little white friends”. Then there was the tennis teaching client who gave me the boot after a month because my tent burned a 6 foot by 3 foot rectangle in their rear lawn. I'd always end up back at Kenny’s house.

Damn Jewish tradition. When Ken called to tell me mom had died she had been buried 3 days, so I had to mourn a memory from my kitchen floor. He’d looked on my schedule and had seen I was working and he didn’t want me to drop everything as I had done when his dad had passed. At first I was angry that he’d made that decision for me. Then I realized it was *for me* and that, again, I was loved. Like I was then in the ’70’s at his house.

Charlotte and Jerry were’t fancy people. They ate spaghetti with ketchup for a fast meal. I had whatever they had. I always had a bed. And I loved working to get a rise out of Charlotte, who could eyeroll and stoneface with the best of them when Ken and I cavorted goofily in her presence.

Trying to sing, acting silly was my and Ken’s sparetime. When their housekeeper or another friend’s doctor Dad proclaimed that we’d never amount to anything, Charlotte and Jerry, remained steadfastly tolerant as we teens found our way.

I remember spotting them in the crowd at a George Carlin show in Delaware out of 7-800 people.

From the stage.

Always with the trying to sing, cavorting, acting silly. You were so proud. You with the stoneface. You the harbor. I’ll love you forever.