*The New Decameron,* Nov 17 2025

Liz and I saw The New Decameron: Songwriters in Lockdown at the Triad on Nov 17, 2025. Liz's husband Tom Toce was one of the three songwriters featured. He had a Zoom pseudo support group during the dark days of Covid with two other songwriters, John Forster and Hillary Rollins. They thought they should collaborate on a project, it would help get them get through lockdown.

John set the tone by performing his song "The Zoom Song," which won the 2023 Manhattan Association of Cabarets and Clubs Award for Best Novelty Song. The chorus was "Don't try to sing along on Zoom." This song was a hoot with two brilliant moments during the second and third iterations of the chorus. The second time he played the tune with his right hand while singing the tune two beats later, illustrating the frequent synch problems on Zoom. And in the final chorus there was a moment when, in the middle of a note, he froze for about ten seconds.

They introduced a film they had made about their lockdown collaboration. They knocked around various ideas and John suggested an adaptation of The Decameron, a 14th century collection of 100 short stories by Giovanni Boccaccio. Tom and Hillary shot down this idea - - who has read The Decameron, who even cares about it? They did write one song about the cultural context of The Decameron, a song with the refrain, "Tonight we're gonna party like it's 1348!"

They decided to do more of a tribute to The Decameron rather than an adaptation - - they asked their songwriter friends to write story songs. Songs on any subject, but the song had to tell a story. This would be The New Decameron. There was some discussion about what makes a song a story song, leading to a heated debate over whether or not "Itsy Bitsy Spider" is a story song. From my point of view, it is a story song, it's just a really stupid story.

While we're talking about spiders, Julie Gold wrote a sweet song about writing a song while a spider spun a web in front of her piano. Matt Corriel wrote my favorite song of the night, "Why I Don't Go Camping Anymore." Both of these songs were represented by videos, fully staged in a charmingly low budget manner. I don't know who wrote what I call "The Porno Puppet" song but the video was a scream. Thems puppets is NASTY.

Here's Corriel singing "Why I Don't Go Camping Anymore."

The film ended and we had a few live performances. Julie Gold did a song about problematic words and names like wiener, shih tzu, Uranus, and pianist. Tom did a song that had been shot down in the video, a song about baseball player Pumpsie Green. Hillary Rollins did a funny song called "One Gray Hair Down There." Billy Recce did this song:

The evening ended with a song written by the three primary songwriters. I love songs that live at the intersection of sweet and vulgar!