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Community Corner

Comedic Singers Highlight March Coffee with Conscience

Concertgoers enjoyed an evening of music and coffee.

Coffee with Conscience, a local coffeehouse concert series featured Christine Lavin and Don White last month.  The Coffee with Conscience series is currently in its tenth season and features a different singer every month.  The concerts are held at the First Methodist Church of Westfield.

Organzied by local coffee businessman Ahrre Maros, the popular folk concert series benefits one local charity a month. Mixing comedy and music, the shows bring out  loyal crowd for the coffeehouse atmosphere.

Maros played up the comedy aspect of the March show by welcoming everyone to the concert saying "Welcome to one of the funniest shows ever!"

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Musician Christing Lavin, a Coffee with Conscience staple, played a mixture of funny songs on a variety of topics (with just a few serious songs thrown in there). Lavin has achieved a level of popularity with the coffeehouse crowd that her last Coffee with Conscience event had to turn people away because of the popularity.

During the March performance, she played one song about how we may be hard wired to be liberal or conservative with five questions to figure out which one you were (or you could be a bit of both).  She played another song which was written especially for dogs and whose lyrics could not be heard by the human ear. 

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Her songs featured audience participation which came in the form of voting on the ending of a song or singing along.  Lavin also read an excerpt of her new book, "Cold Pizza for Breakfast: A Mem-wha??"  She ended off the set with baton twirling.

After an intermission with coffee provided by Ahrre's Coffee Roastery, Don White took the stage.  Many of the audience members were familiar with Lavin but not Don White.  Lavin ensured everyone who had not heard of him that "you're going to remember this night." 

White comes from Massachusetts and has released seven CD's, two DVD's and one book.  He is a mixture of a stand up comic and a singer, but he also had one or two serious songs in his set.  His songs mainly focused on his marriage and "joys" of raising children and teenagers.  He summed up the experience of raising teenagers by saying "teenagers are the most exhausting things on earth!" 

He talked about the difference between men and women in their television watching habits.  He loves to watch baseball partly because his wife hates it so much that she will leave him alone while it is on.  His wife on the other hand always seems to be watching crying women on television.  He claimed to have discovered that it is the "Crying Woman Channel." White also read an excerpt from his book ("Memoirs of a C Student"), claiming it would "bring you so far into my family that you too will need therapy."

For the end of the show both performers took the stage and played a few songs together.  They then hid behind their hands in lieu of going backstage and then came out for an encore.  

Each concert benefits a selected charity.  There are five charities selected and each charity is paired with two concerts per season.  They receive one-third of the price received from ticket sales. To start off the concert a representative from this months charity, the Plainfield branch of Habitat for Humanity, came to the stage to give a bit of information about the organization. He thanked Coffee with Conscience and anyone that had previously supported the organization in any way for their support.  The chapter has been 100-percent volunteer run for 21 years.  They have built a total of 32 houses.

There are only a few more concerts in this season of Coffee with Conscience, but two of them are big names in folk music circles.  Featured in April will be Lucy Kaplansky and in May will by John McCutcheon. 

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