Since the evening after Christmas, I’ve been a little concerned about the next generation, the one that follows mine. That evening my sisters, cousins, and I presented “A Musical History of the Bolly Girls” a true farce about our childhood and teen years.

The five of us had worked for about three months preparing a singing/dancing event to entertain our daughters and granddaughters at our annual Bolly girls party. None of us carry the name of our grandfather, John Bolly, but we’ve always been proud to call ourselves Bolly girls. We thought the younger ones should know all about being a Bolly girl, so we wrote and presented what we thought was a musical comedy of our life on the hill in old South Memphis.

To the tune of “The Crawdad Song,” We sang about Grandma and our mothers, and then about us.
Five in all, we had a ball, Honey, baby mine.

Grandpa brought home from the cemetery, Honey,
Loads of ribbons in colors bright, Babe.
We sewed those ribbons and made some skirts,
Worn with pride. We were a sight! Honey, baby, mine

Our audience sat silently watching as we sang about Doris’s pet duck that was eaten by Mrs. Stackhouse and about our friends and the spanks we got. I never heard a snicker, and we thought we were doing funny stuff. Couldn‘t figure out why they weren’t laughing, or groaning, or something.

Orma’s dream was to dance on stage,
But a concussion stopped that at an early age,

We wore our daddy’s shirts; we wore our daddy’s ties.

Then she held a baton up high,
Leading on the marching band,

For pots and pans and dirty dishes,
And for your hands and for your face.

When we sang, “Grandma’s Lye Soap” in the most off-key, raucous voices we could muster, no response. Guess they didn’t want to hurt our feelings. By then the youngest granddaughters were getting into the spirit and wore big smiles as they stared at us.

By the time we got to “Jesus Loves Me,” I was seeing more smiles. Almost everybody