Humorous Lavin performs with, not for, her audience

VIRGINIA BEACH

Beyond her talent as a singer, guitar player, humorist and story teller, Christine Lavin showed Saturday that she was a master at reeling an audience in to become part of her show.

She was in the lobby of the Virginia Beach Central Library before her concert in its auditorium, knitting and chatting with all comers.

With her close-cropped gray hair, glasses, loose-fitting black top, baggy black pants with a colorful fish pattern, and green canvas sneakers with pink laces, she looked like a cherubic, eccentric near-grandma.

She connected with the audience right out of the gate, singing her first song a cappella about being in Virginia Beach on a Saturday night. Showing her creativity, she used a looping device that allowed her to record her voice as she sang and play it back, so she could sing harmony with herself.

She introduced each song with a funny story, and the songs exemplified her ability to take an everyday event and spin it into something fun.

Example: Reader's Digest did a survey that found New York City to be the most polite in the world. She sang: "The editors of Readers Digest had too much time on their hands one day. "

When two little girls came tentatively down the aisle, Lavin stopped mid-story to welcome them to cross the stage to get to the exit, but they really wanted to get two seats in the front row.

She invited the audience to be come psychics. She turned a math trick, in which you start with any number and a series of calculations always results in one number, into a song and got people to add, subtract and multiply along.

For a song about a mother and daughter battling over piercings and face lifts, she used the names of a mother and daughter in the crowd: Valeria and Spirit.

To end the first set, she surveyed the crowd to see who had birthdays closest to Christmas or New Year's Day. Lavin's birthday is Jan. 2, and she said she thinks people get cheated of gifts when their big days are too close to Christmas.

She brought two audience members, Al and Lynn, down to take part in a game-show-style contest and made them answer questions, mostly about things she had mentioned in her songs. She appointed another audience member as scorekeeper and naturally told the crowd they could answer questions, too.

By the second act, it wasn't Lavin's concert anymore, it was everyone's.

After her song about liking bald men - " You're not losing hair, you're gaining face" - a shiny-domed man gave her a standing ovation.

Later, an older gentleman, wearing a paper crown, went down to the stage between numbers to thank Lavin. He said 20 years earlier, he went to a Lavin concert with his lady, and they wound up getting married. His wife snapped a picture of the man with Lavin.

When she asked people to sing along with the old folk chestnut "Where Have All the Flowers Gone," there was near total buy-in.

If she got such a huge laugh to a joke mid-song that she lost her place and forgot what part she was on, nobody minded.

For the finale, when she asked all the men to crowd behind her on the stage to help her sing "Sensitive, New Age Guys," they all climbed down to sing, sway back and forth, and snap their fingers.

The audience of roughly 100 to 150 people did a fine job Saturday. Christine Lavin, too.

The Tidewater Friends of Folk Music sponsored the show. The library's auditorium is a nice venue for its concert series. It's a cozy hall for music, and the coffee shop in the lobby serves a nice assortment of drinks and snacks.

Dan Duke, (757) 446-2546, dan.duke@pilotonline.com