Tiny Tim takes a do-over

This story came to mind recently because I've been spending more time visiting my parents, who are now both in their mid-late 80's. I'm feeling that my time with them is growing short, and every visit prompts reflections, often on the drive back home, of times past.

My dad once got tickets to a concert, which was a very unusual occurrence. This was in the '70's, before there were casinos in our area, but it was a casino-type show featuring Tiny Tim - a ukulele player who sang in a quavering falsetto. It is very hard to describe his kind of performance, and almost harder to explain his popularity in the 1960s and 1970s.

I was a teenager, and already at the stage where I didn't want to do anything with my parents, least of all see Tiny Tim in concert. But I went, reluctantly (I did most things reluctantly those days).

The show started. There was something wrong with the PA system. The sound was broken up, and dropped out for stretches at a time. The monitors must have worked OK, because Tim kept going for three or four songs before someone got word to him that the sound was messed up. He stopped. I was slunk down in my seat - it was excruciating.

They fixed the sound in a few minutes, and he kicked off again. But wait... he restarted from the first song. Teenage me was mortified. He was heaping embarrassment on top of failure. What a disaster! Those four songs took forever, and the remainder of the concert crawled by.

I took stock as I left; that was likely to be the worst show I would ever see in my life. Bad music, bad sound - and a do-over!

My parents had a different view. "What a performer!" they said. "How brave of him to keep going, and even to redo the songs we hadn't heard." I thought they were insane.

Now, as I look back, I have a lot more respect for Tiny Tim, and for my parents' assessment of the concert. It would have been easy for him to storm off in a huff when the sound failed - he wasn't the sound guy, after all. Or he could have run through the rest of his set quickly and gotten out of there; no one would have blamed him for that. But, instead, he thought of his audience. He thought of my parents. They had paid good money for those tickets; they deserved the best show he could give. And they deserved the entire show. So he took a risk and restarted.

It takes a lot of courage to be a performer, and that same courage is useful in many areas of life - when trying something new, when making a break with the past, when standing up for your beliefs. When faced with those situations, perhaps I'll wonder, "What Would Tiny Tim Do?"

[As I wrote earlier, it's hard to describe a Tiny Tim performance. Fortunately, we have YouTube]