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The Laughing Singer
I sang a cappella in the chapel (redundant, I know)! 
I’m laughing because I had just posed like an opera singer with my mouth open and my hands out and then cracked up because I embarrassed myself. There’s an interesting story behind this. A woman in our tour group asked me if I wanted her to take my photo with the chapel behind me because I had just sung in it. How did that come to be? Well, it all began when I saw our tourguide in the restaurant where we all stopped for lunch. He was sitting by himself at a table and I walked up and said, “Ah… tutto sole?” (meaning, “Aw… all alone?” in Italian). He asked me how I knew Italian, and I told him from musical terminology and opera. He asked if I were a singer, and I said yes. Then he told me we were going to be going into a chapel that was designed to be acoustically perfect, and he asked if I would be willing to sing a line or two so everyone could hear. I said sure. I was thinking I would sing the first few lines of “Que Gelida Manina” until we got to the church and I realized that a song from La Boheme would not be appropriate. I racked my brain for something spiritual to sing, and I recalled a short solo I had sung in my senior year at the School of Creative & Performing Arts: the “Benedictus” phrase from Hans Schubert’s “Mass in G.” For those of you who don’t know it, the phrase is “Benedictus qui venit in nomine domini” which is Latin for “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.” I sang it and everyone was pleased. Several people came up to me to thank me personally. I was just glad that the pleasure I had in singing was not selfish, but was considered a gift to others, which is ideal. So, this was a perfectly spontaneous photo to commemorate a wonderfully fortuitous occasion.
(Taken by a fellow tourist in the courtyard by the side of the Cathedral of Santa Croce in Florence, Italy, with the chapel in the background.)
Meeting Liza Minelli
I met Liza when I worked at J.W. Robinson in Beverly Hills in 1987. I walked up to her and gushed! She smiled, shook my hand, and said, “Thank you.”
I worked at Fred Segal on Melrose for about a week and waited on Liza Minelli. She was looking for a scoop-necked t-shirt. At one point, she was said something silly and then chided herself, saying, “Oh, Liza!” I was able to find her the shirt she wanted.
I just thought of something very interesting. Liza Minelli: Three Weeks at Carnegie Hall was the first CD I ever bought. And I met Liza only weeks after buying that CD. I sang with ABBA when I was 11, and “Dancing Queen” was the first 45 RPM single I ever bought. I met Toni Tenille at Robinson’s, too, and Love Will Keep Us Together was the first LP vinyl record I ever bought. Basically, I have met all the artists I admired so much that theirs were the first recordings I rushed out to buy. How many people can say that?
Meeting Toni Tennille
I met Toni Tenille when I was working at J.W. Robinson in Beverly Hills. She was very gracious. I told her about how “Love Will Keep Us Together” was the first album I ever spent my allowance on (ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” was the first single). I told her about how, when I was 9, I was riding in the car with my paternal grandparents, sitting on the front bench seat between Granny and Grandpa, with my hand on grandpa’s leg. I was singing, “The Way That I Want to Touch You” without even thinking about it when my grandmother suddenly asked, “Danny! What is that song you’re singing? That’s an awfully strange lyric for a boy to be singing!” And imagine how my grandfather felt with my hand on his leg while I sang it! Well, Toni laughed and said, “Ah, kids!” (politely skipping over the embarrasing issues that could be read into that story) and told me that she was really proud of that song because she wrote it.
I never realized it until just now, writing this, but I have had the supreme delight of meeting the artists who made the first music I ever bought! How many people can say that? Thank you, ABBA and Toni Tenille!
