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I don't remember if Dad initiated the outing, or if he came along, but one of the shows he went to with the family was a trio doing Allen Sherman songs.

(Dad I think was less likely to go to plays and shows, though one thing he made a point to do was take all of us sons at various times to both the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Pops.)

The group did amazing work with a piano where Allen Sherman had a small orchestra backing him up.

The show-stopping number is a song called Good Advice in which Sherman explains how he told Sigmund Freud to buy a leather couch and Orville and Wilbur Wright to take their washing machine ("'What are all those wings for?' They said for hanging clothes out to dry") down to Kitty Hawk, and see if the darn thing'll fly... among many other key pieces of advice in the history of humankind. The chorus is always "And that was Good Advice, Good Advice, good advice costs nothing and it's, worth the price" and a line that changes like "When every word you hear, is the message of the year, that's good ad-vice" or "I'm so smart that I'm, going to win a Guggenheim, for good ad-vice." In the encore verses, the finar verse is:

Christopher Columbus was a seaman second class
when I told him that the Indies could be found
by sailing to the West instead of sailing to the East
I advised him that I thought the world was round
(I really thought so).
And then I sent him down to ask good Queen Isabel
to pawn her jewels for all their worth
Next day he set sail, and as everyone knows
he fell off the edge of the earth.

Dad doesn't miss a beat: "And that was good advice, good advice..."

At the time I said "no Dad, it's not!"

The actual chorus is:

And that was bad advice, bad advice.
Bad advice is just the same as good advice.
Everybody makes
occasional mistakes
and that was
bad
ad-
vice!

As my education in history and political reality improved, especially by the time I spent much of a year of collenge hanging out with the people from the Native American floor in Chadbourne dormitory, I saw of course that Dad was right.