Song and Dance Man

by Peter Russell

From the time my mum moved into a nursing home, I used to take my kids there regularly – to play their half-size violins for my mum and her nursing-home friends. And that was the inspiration for my career as a song-and-dance man.

My mum lasted ten years after that then died more peacefully than most people have ever lived. Our kids grew up, graduated, left their violins hanging on the dining room wall of our family home and joined a world where busking as an adolescent trio no longer paid the bills. 

I, however, remained a child. Or at least part of me did. I took over from where my kids left off and rediscovered the joy of entertaining the residents of local Sydney nursing homes as a cabaret performer: rekindling the old music hall songs that my mum used to sing to me when she was making a cuppa in the mornings or pegging clothes onto our old hills hoist out the back that would creak and groan right along with her as she sang. 

Twenty years after our last child fled the nest my wife died suddenly – well before her time and well before I was ready to be left alone. My kids and their families had all moved interstate and all I seemed to have left to warm my soul were my straw decker hat, my black-and-yellow striped music hall blazer, my trusty old black cane and the maroon satin bowtie I’d got married in. 

Then I met Hannah Koenig Nemechek. Hannah was an American from Florida, or – as she pronounced it Floor-ida. She’d taken charge of the local nursing home where I was now a regular entertainer, appearing there magically one day with her shock of dark curls and her beautiful perennial smile. I had been bashing out my usual list of music hall songs on the old unloved piano in the dining room. I was finishing with a flourish - with my signature Sammy Davis Jnr number, ‘Song and Dance Man’, when I found Hannah beaming at me from the nearby nurses’ station. 

 ‘Do you understand what joy ya’all are giving these gentle folk?’ she exclaimed in her southern drawl. 

From that time onwards, Hannah’s transcendent presence would follow me long after I’d packed away my song and dance gear, waved goodbye to my audience and retreated to the solitude of my tiny bed-sitter. She was the reason I’d keep waking up in the morning with an extra heartbeat. I found myself visiting her nursing home even when I had no real reason to be there, though I always found one. 

Hannah Koenig Nemechek had the ability – as the song and dance number says - to ‘make a sad heart smile’. She became the ‘little lady’ of my ‘Song and Dance’ routine and the ‘glorious feeling’ I had when I swapped my cane for an open brolly to perform, Gene Kelly style, ‘Singing in the Rain’. Sometimes I brought the house down but more often than not the residents who endured my concerts would simply fall asleep. But I didn’t care. Every time I performed my routines, Hannah and her radiant smile were somehow filling the room – even when she was not there. The only way I could ever tell her how I felt about her was by song and dance. 

The day I decided to tell Hannah that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her was the day my son appeared, unexpectedly, when I was performing my usual cabaret routine at Hannah’s nursing home. 

 ‘I let myself into your flat this morning,’ my son began, ‘And the place is a mess, Dad – dirty dishes, bedclothes everywhere and not one scrap of food in the fridge!’

My son was standing alongside Hannah and for the first time in my living memory she was not wearing her smile. 

‘There’s someone we’d like y’all to meet, Peter,’ she said. ‘He’d like to have a really friendly little chat with ya, honey.’

So I followed the two of them into Hannah’s office and had this weird conversation with this total stranger that seemed to go nowhere – for me anyway. 

Then, at the end of it all, my son took me aside and asked, ‘Do you like this place, dad?’

‘Like a…like…yes…’ I faltered.

‘Like a second home perhaps?’

‘Home…of course…yes.’

For some reason I caught my son and Hannah exchanging glances. We were standing in a tight little circle – just me, Hannah and my son, but I can’t quite remember where it was now.

Then a wonderful thing happened. Hannah reached out and took my hand and squeezed it. It made me look up from wherever I was and lose myself in her beautiful face with its beautiful smile and the reflection in her dark brown eyes of someone who looked a bit like me. It seemed.

‘I love my life here,’ I heard myself tell them both. ‘Promise me…promise you will never leave me in a home again by myself.’

‘I promise,’ replied my son.

‘Welcome to your new life here, Mister Song-and-dance Man,’ ventured Hannah, with her trademark smile and another squeeze of my hand.

© Peter Russell, 2020