Singalong
songbooks
now for sale

Easy sheet music
for 300+ favorites

$39.95*

Including free templates
for audience lyrics sheets

Finally, a singalong songbook of sheet music with easy-to-follow melody lines, chords and lyrics for more than 300 oldtime favorites. songbookIdeal for singalongs at nursing homes, senior residences or just at your own home. Bound in a loose-leaf binder of durable vinyl, unsnaps for access to pages. (To see a photo of the book, click here.)

Each songbook comes with templates for copying lyrics of more than 240 songs to hand out to audience members, a great way to get audiences involved.**

To order Sing along with ease, email sidleavitt@yahoo.com directly or enter your email address as a comment in our latest blog entry and we will email you. (Your email address won't appear in the comments section.)

To review our sales procedures and philosophy, click on our entry entitled We trust you.

*plus $5.79 shipping in U.S.

**An electronic version of these templates is available free to customers who wish to reformat lyrics sheets on their own computer.

Free books
still offered

from frustrated writers
to adventurous readers

This site offers a library of original text works – nonfiction, fiction or poetry of all lengths, published and unpublished – that have been submitted free by their authors. To find these, please visit the 'Works' section in the upper righthand column of this page. This site does not claim copyright to any of these works, and no modification of any work has been done except for style formatting. No work may be reused commercially, and any noncommercial reuse must give credit to the author.

To upload...

Sorry, we're not accepting any new works right now.

To comment...

Readers are free to download any listing from the 'Works' section, subject to the aforementioned restrictions, and to provide comments to the site administrator at sidleavitt@yahoo.com for publication in the 'Comments on works' listing. To comment on any excerpt or other post shown in the center column, simply do so directly beneath the post by clicking on the '(No) Comments' link. Unless otherwise specified, all comments will be published, subject to libel guidelines.

About us...

This blog was started as a nonprofit website giving writers a place to publish their work at no cost and readers a chance to read that work and, if they chose, to comment on it. Now we are concentrating on a singalong songbook, also an idealistic project that promotes volunteer music programs at nursing homes and senior residences as well as family singing at home, all through easy, low-cost sheet music. Although we no longer accept new works from authors, all previous submissions are still available in our 'Works' section. We also maintain a blogroll of diverse sites, all well-written, for readers to explore, although at present, no new sites are being accepted for listing. The site's founder and administrator is its first nonfiction contributor, Sid Leavitt, a retired newspaper editor who lives in Lake Katrine, N.Y.

Meta

Portrait of a writer

October 4, 2007

mike

Mike’s Circular File is a potpourri of musings by a 40-something white guy from Chicago — some of them funny, others touching, all touched by a mild cynicism — but what sold me was his MySpace portrait as Mr. Ipanema.

So there’s Mike Pontillo, standing above the beach at Rio de Janeiro, holding what appears to be a guidebook to Brazil. Against a backdrop of surf, sand and sleek sunbathers, the rather endomorphic Pontillo is bundled into a heavy coat, scarf, gloves, ear-flap hat and a pinched expression, all of this accompanied by a caption in Latin that, to the best of my memory of classes in that language 50 years ago in high school, says, “I can’t hear you. There’s a banana stuck in my ear.”

What’s not to like about this happy traveler?

That’s what makes his infrequent entries — only about three dozen dating back to November 1999 — so appealing: They tell you that a 40-something white guy from Chicago, feeling pinched by reality, is still willing to face it on his own terms. A guy on a sun-drenched beach in winter clothes.

Pontillo, a technical analyst with a background in computers, describes himself as a political liberal with a conservative lifestyle, a dichotomy that appears in much of his writing. He was so upset by the 2004 presidential election that he couldn’t write for a while, but he also ranted that same year about a new law signed by the Democratic governor of Illinois giving nursing mothers the right to breast feed in any public place in the state:

In the course of a given day, I have been known to perform several ‘completely natural acts’ of my own. However, most people would object, strenuously, if I insisted on performing those acts in public. (’Lactation Frustration,’ Aug. 16, 2004)

He rails at religious zealots willing to kill, injure or ostracize others for their beliefs, but is put off by a “dirty little secret” among gay men:

There are a lot of really cool things about being gay. Well, except one. Let me explain where I stand on the issue of penetration. Ain’t nobody sticking nothing in me nowhere, no way, no how. So I’m not allowed to be gay. They put you on probation if you only want to pitch. The whole system breaks down if everyone’s a pitcher. Somebody’s got to catch. (’Homosexuality: The Final Solution,’ Feb. 25)

And, oh yes, the only way to hang toilet paper is so that it unrolls from the underside, not the top: “Don’t argue with me. You’re just wrong.” (’Let’s Give It Up for … Lent,’ Feb. 9, 2005)

But among these criticisms of society and culture, most of them rather mild, are some powerful reflections on the human condition.

His first entry, Nov. 8, 1999, an essay on the life and early death of Chicago Bears running back Walter Payton, reaffirms Pontillo’s reasons for giving up Catholicism and his belief in God but not his belief in the goodness of people like Payton, a man known for his charitable work, devotion to family, courage in the face of his illness.

How many suicide bombers do you suppose there would be if they couldn’t be coerced into throwing away their earthly lives for the promise of some kind of paradise in the hereafter? John Lennon posed the question years ago: How would you live your life if there were no heaven? . . . Maybe we would realize that there just isn’t time for selfishness and pettiness. That the only things that outlast us are the impressions we make on others by living this life as well and as fully as we can . . . Maybe if we realized how limited our time really was, we might all live our lives like Walter Payton.

In ‘Unspoken Vows,’ July 25, 2005, a friend whose marriage has failed shares the following thoughts:

Maybe we all had our own extra, unspoken vows . . . Obviously my wife did. Right after the vows we had rehearsed, she added an extra one, ‘Until such time as I decide this relationship no longer meets my needs.’ I just didn’t hear it. Maybe the organ was too loud.

Mine? Yeah, I guess I had one, too. Mine was, ‘With this ring, I hereby abdicate all responsibility for my life and well-being.’

The pain of separation is the theme of the autobiographical ‘Room 219′ (Oct. 19, 2004), and in his latest entry, ‘The D-word’ (Aug. 8), Pontillo talks about his family’s history of divorce, a melancholy essay that concludes with the end of his own marriage.

Mike’s Circular File is the latest addition to our blogroll of well-written sites.

– Sid Leavitt

Posted in Uncategorized |

Leave a Comment

Please note: Comment moderation is enabled and may delay your comment. There is no need to resubmit your comment.