The Mabel Kay Senior Center serves as a resource for seniors throughout the borough and surrounding area.
It’s a safe community outlet for seniors to engage with others and participate in unique activities. One of the activities the center recently started offering is the option to participate in The Golden Kazoos, a band where members of the center that wish to participate play kazoos in harmony.
Sheri Siegel is the executive director of the center, who first proposed the idea to the seniors after overhearing a conversation between several of the attendees of the Wednesday morning coffee group called Coffee and Schmooze.
After one of the men in the group, named Henry Mikol, started playing his accordion, a remark from another senior gave Siegel the idea.
“I overheard someone say that the only instrument that they know how to play is a kazoo,” Siegel recalled. “And I just decided in that moment that we needed to do a kazoo band. It was just one of those cockamamie ideas that made sense at the time. It’s inexpensive and it’s easy to carry, and it’s social.”
The band has been operating and practicing together for about a month. The had their soft opening performance at the center’s annual picnic on Sept. 13.
“The people in the band are loving it,” Siegel said, adding the idea was wacky enough to allow people to be “young at heart.”
Currently, the band has loosely 20 members. All seniors are welcome at any time, and no experience is required for membership.
The group is sponsored by the Interfaith Caregivers of Haddonfield and Haddon Heights, funding T-shirts that are given to members of the band. The shirts are also sold to the public for the benefit of the senior center.
“I think the shirts make people feel a bit more pride in actually participating in this,” Siegel noted.
Mikol plays his accordion in the background to keep the band in time with one another.
“My job is really to keep everybody in the same key,” Mikol explained. “It’s not about the accordion; it’s about the kazoo. So I play in the background very softly, so that’s all it is. And I’m having fun doing that.”
And, Mikol notes, “if my accordion breaks down, I have a kazoo.”
The group plays a range of songs. During a practice on Sept. 23, the group featured “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” “Yellow Submarine,” The Eagles Fight Song, “When the Saints Go Marching In,” and “God Bless America.”
At the practice, the group debated what they should yell out at the end of The Eagles Fight Song, before landing on spelling out the team’s name and then yelling it.
Susi Coley is the director for the band. She is a long-time choral member, who previously had no directing experience but enthusiastically leads the band members through practices and performances. She had seen a similar band and decided to join.
The band will make its community debut at the Haddonfield Fall Festival on Oct. 4 on the steps of the Baptist Church. The performance will begin at 11 a.m.
“I just want people to come support us, to love us,” Siegel said.
Anyone interested in joining the group or for more information can contact Sheri Siegel at ssiegel@haddonfield-nj.gov.
