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Jonathan Richman: Wax Museum, Washington DC

Geoffrey Himes, Musician, January 1983

IT'S EASY TO laugh at Jonathan Richman's wavering, off-key singing as he drifts off into naive, spoken monologues. When he visited Washington's Wax Museum this fall, the crowd laughed at his earnest but awkward Motown dance gestures and his halting descriptions of running after the ice cream truck in the summertime. Yet as they waited for Richman to give the signal that it was all a camp routine, the sign never came.

Total word count of piece: 634

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