We do it as a duet, with the girls hamming it up through the verses, then coming together for the choruses. Lots of gestures, posturing and "vogueing" to communicate the meaning. The big finish at the end, with the pyramid of half note triplets built through the entire group, is what I call "armpit music", the sort of stuff where the vocalist throw up their free arms into the air at the climatic moment.
And, having a girl who can do it is only one part of the problem. The woodwind section in the middle (a pyramid built with the clarinet, alto and tenors) is very difficult, especially on the clarinet.
I have about a hundred of what I call "performance" numbers, where the storyline is almost as important as the music or the words. Most of it isn't what you would consider dancing music - it's more like entertaining revue material. (Our current group has about thirty of these ready to go at any one time.) I usually program these during the last third of the cocktail set (to introduce vocalist(s) to the crowd), or in the last half of the dinner set, when people are sitting idle but it's too early for serious dancing.
Big Time is one that I like to use as a set opener, what with the dramatic drum chorus at the opening (during which time the vocalists enter the lighted zone) and the uptempo nature of the whole piece.
A lot of making this work depends on the vocalists that you are gifted/tasked with. In the beginning with our group, we had a baritone (who doubled trombone) and a couple of altos, but over the past five years I've had a baritone and a countertenor (sic), plus a crop of mezzos, none of whom were instrumental doubles, affording me far greater flexibility. Unfortunately, they come and go (one actually went out to the West Coast to break into entertainment out there - he's pretty good, but I don't think he's that good), so the training process is an ongoing burden.
I do have two excellent "performers" in my trombone section, but you have to be careful not to draw down the instrumental talent too far to suit the vocals. I do the comic male lead vocals on Love Shack and One Night In Bangkok, but (again) I have to be careful to pick tunes where half of the deep bass of the band won't be missed all that much. All in all, it's a balancing act, another problem to deal with in a whole constellation of them.
Some are just chores, pure and simple. Today, I did trouble shooting on each and every one of our stand lights. Two gave us trouble last Saturday, and I tested each and every one with a certified "good" light bulb. All twenty of them had to be unpacked, the cord unwound, the light tested, and (if the light did not work) the certified bulb tried instead. Then, it was pack them all up again, also a bit of a chore. It turns out that the "bad" light was just a case of a loose nut on the shaft of the light fixture portion, combined with a burnt out bulb.
This would be easy to correct, excepting only one thing - I visited Lowe's (the big hardware chain) to pick up some new bulbs and found than they no longer carried them. I hope that the phase out of incandescents hasn't progressed too far, and that they can still be purchased. I didn't see any fluorescents that would make a good substitute, and the LED music stand lights that are currently available don't light things up all that well.
I do have a small flashlight with a strip of LEDs that can serve as a backup. It is so bright that you cannot look directly into it, takes only two AAA batteries, and will burn for a solid day on one set of them. I had kept one of these by the sound system to do emergency troubleshooting, but I now carry two with fresh batteries, just in case of a stand light failure.
As Harold Hill once said, "Never a dull moment in the music business"...
