A Field Trip to the Retirement Home

I believe it's important to give my students as many performance opportunities as possible in as many different places as possible. For this reason, I took them on a field trip to a local retirement home. Now I've sung at a lot of retirement homes and not one of those experiences was like this one.
We arrived and there was a grueling tournament of Dominoes going on. This presented a problem because no one wanted to leave their game so we sang an entire concert to two people, one of which had no idea what was going on! One lady rolled her wheelchair up to the choir and started talking to the students in the middle of one of our songs! They didn't know what to do. Then this same lady took one of my girls' water bottle and began drinking out of it!

After our concert, we decided to take a break and wait for the dominoes to end and then sing a couple of our songs again once we had an actual audience. Well during our break, two ladies began arguing with one another and one of them grabbed my music stand and tried to push the other lady with it!

Another lady was yelling obscenities across the room.

Then, finally, we were singing again and one lady started yelling at one of our teachers thinking she was someone else. From across the room she yelled "Sharon go get the car...can you hear me? Are you listening to me?" Over and over.

It was quite the experience for my students. Most of them have not been in a situation like this. I explained that it was important that we visit these places because if we can make one person's day then it's worth it. It was a stressful experience but it was well worth it, and we'll go back again...hopefully when there is not a serious game of Dominoes going on!