She switched on the disco lights, and sang Ten Guitars. Little points of coloured light moved on the wall behind her in the lounge. It's a narrow lounge, with a row of armchairs facing the wall and two couches at either end – one by the front door, one by a window which looks out on to a tree, a grass verge, the skies of West Auckland.
She sang Help Me Make it Through the Night. I wondered about that as a choice to sing at a rest home where the issue of making it through the night is a clear and present danger. But I was listening to the wrong end of the song: the message of the Kris Kristofferson standard isn't fear and loneliness, but support and love. The staff got the residents into their chairs, sorted out their meds and arranged the blankets over the legs of Ros: the Friday morning concert was in her honour.
She sang The Rose. I visited Roseridge rest home a lot in summer and got to know staff and residents, their daily lives, their existence in a small house with a white picket fence and four toilets. Dom always spoke the most. He looked good; he'd lost a bit of weight, and grown his hair, which made him seem younger. "They haven't killed me yet," he growled. "I don't trust nobody." The old paranoia was still there and he read from a new catalogue of pain: "I get wicked headaches. I get hand spasms and the blood goes straight to the brain, and the legs. It's like a hot iron on your hip. It's like holding on to an electric fence …"
She sang Woolly Bully. Now that one got them going; Gonza waved her arms in the air, and Ros, although asleep, tapped her foot. The music was getting through to her and fragments of a long life came out of her: "It has to be straight," she said. "You've got to keep it straight." Ros has enjoyed close, wonderful care at Roseridge, but lifting her out of her chair has become a health and safety issue for staff and she will be transferred to a nearby aged care facility. Shea, a manager at Roseridge and its vibrant source of energy and fun, gave a speech before the concert. "It's a sad day," she said. "Ros needs to go to the next level. It's heartbreaking. If I could, I would take her home."
She sang La Bamba. Salati really got into that one and broke into a fantastic dance performance, which owed something to his youth back in Samoa. I thought about William Clauson, a Danish-American folksinger who heard La Bamba played at a wedding in Mexico in the 1950s, introduced it into his set, and helped it become one of the world's most famous and recognisable songs. He played it at a concert at the Wellington Town Hall, in 1957; the live recording pops up in op-shops all over New Zealand, and it's a thrill to hear a New Zealand audience going crazy at the song a year before Ritchie Valens made it a Top 40 hit in the US. I managed to get hold of Clauson in 2016. He was living in a rest home in Tijuana. I asked what he was going to do that day. "Same as I always do, son," he said. "Sit outside in the sun a while with a cup of coffee and smoke me a cigar." He died in 2017.
