I put on a one–man cabaret concert in 1996. This is one of the songs I sang— “Try To Remember” from The Fantasticks, lyrics by Tom Jones & music by David Schmidt. This performance was held at A Better Worlde Galleria in the Mission Hills neighborhood of San Diego, California in 1996. My pianist was James Bianchi.

When I was twenty years old, I made up a couple of outgoing greetings for my answering machine based on an old TV show theme song and a showtune from Bye Bye Birdie. The TV show theme song was from I Love Lucy and the song from Bye Bye Birdie was “Talk to Me” which is originally sung from a telephone booth. Anyway, I created these outgoing greetings and I left them on my answering machine for a little while, and then I felt sort of silly about them and afraid of what people might think, so I took them off. But now here we are in the Age of YouTube, and it’s—gosh—almost twenty-five years later, and I figured, “Why not? Just for fun, share them with the world.” So, here are my silly outgoing greeting songs that I created in 1988. Hope you enjoy!

Talk to me. Don’t hang up. Please talk to me.
I don’t care what you say. Talk to me.
Leave your name and telephone—
Gratefully, when I come home,
I will listen very near.
Then I’ll call you, dear.
Talk to me. Leave a message. Talk to me!
And I’ll get back to you— talk to me.

This is Daniel, and I’m not home.
If I were, I’d pick up the phone.
Just leave your name and a message—
I’ll call you before you can rhyme “message.”
Keep it simple and not too long.
If you’d like, you can sing a song!
Just leave your name and number,
And then, you have yourself a wonderful day!
Ba-ba-ba Ba-ba-ba-Ba-ba-bah Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-bah!

Original music for “Talk to Me” written by Charles Strouse with lyrics by Lee Adams; new lyrics by Daniel Greene.
Original music for I Love Lucy theme song written by Eliot Daniel; new lyrics by Daniel Greene.

Sums up how I feel about meeting my life partner, Andy, almost five years before the day I recorded this. From the Broadway musical On The Town, music by Leonard Bernstein, lyrics by Betty Comden & Adolph Green.

I posted this almost a year ago on our family blog via Flickr (no closed-captions), and at the time, I was critical of my own performance. Now, I just enjoy it. I hope you do, too.

Here I am singing one of my favorite songs– a song I live by!