The Ballad of Miss Ella

I’m still hammering away at learning “The Ballad of Miss Ella,” the song I wrote for my friend Mike Funt’s drag persona, Miss Ella. The assignment was to provide a bawdy song to introduce Ella to her audience, explaining how she became a “spiritual shaman.”

Not a problem. The subtitle of the piece is “The Spirit Is Coming in Me,” and whatever you’re imagining as the delivery for that recurring line, you’re right.

After I delivered the finished song, Mike allowed as how it was one of the hardest songs he ever had to learn. I am just now finding out what he meant.

For him, it may have been the changing time signatures: which measures are 6/8 and which are 9/8? For me, it’s the lyrics. They’re all easy to sing, but they’re kind of stochastic, in that there’s no real logical progression from one to the other. I’ve had to create all kinds of mental connections between one line and the next to remind me what comes after that third “I’ve got healing just for you.”

And just how many “Healin’!”’s are there, anyway?

The number starts out with a rumbling upward glissando from the piano, followed by a quasi-NOLA funeral march as Ella invites the audience to attend her thrilling tale of brokenness and strife.

After the intro, we’re into a hard-driving vamp song in which Ella recounts her past life, her old bar — the Kingfisher Club — and that disastrous night that that “horrible storm” washed her out to sea. (This section has the worst pun that the audience will hear all night this Friday at Really Matters Theater.)

Finally, now that we’re fully aware of the shamanic energy in whose presence we are blessed to be, Ella launches into a raucous (and bawdy) gospel number, offering healin’ to one and all. A tambourine is involved, and I expect to get the audience on their feet feelin’ the spirit.

Intrigued? You should be. Come on, come in, come see my show, I got healin’ just for you.

Really Matters Theater, Friday, May 23, 8:00 p.m., $5.00 admission; Southern Arc Dance Center, 40 Greenway Ct. Newnan, Georgia 30265.