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SONG PARODY DURING A PANDEMIC
Alice Gomstyn, a Glen Rock resident since 2010, is the humorist behind Facebook's "Mildly Inappropriate Mommy" page, which has accumulated over 1.2 million followers since it began in 2011.
​I’ve been creating humor content in one form or another since I was 12, when I wrote a humor column for my middle school newspaper. But it’s always been a hobby or a side hustle at most, so I never bothered venturing into the video side. Filming anything intimidated me. The pandemic changed that.

About a month in, so many of us had become, by necessity, very familiar with Zoom. When I realized that besides meetings, Zoom could be used to just record videos, it presented an opportunity to film something with relatively little effort, at least from a technical standpoint. So I wrote a song parody of The Sound of Music’s “My Favorite Things,” called, ahem, “My Quarantine Things.”

​Since this was still early on in the pandemic, it included references to toilet paper, frantic cleaning, and Tiger King — though I must confess I have yet to actually watch Tiger King –  I guess I just prefer house cats to jungle cats. 
Anyway, since my own singing voice makes most people long for either ear plugs or cyanide pills, I recruited a very talented friend, Christina Joseph Robinson, to sing the parody while I pantomimed along to the verses with various props on hand, including a tiger mask, cleaning spray, and, of course, a roll of toilet paper.

I posted the video to my Facebook humor page, where it’s since garnered over 160,000 views.

There are so many humorists with real musical chops and actual video production skills out there who post song parody videos all the time; I harbor no delusions of rising to their level.

But I’m glad to have experimented with the format and hope that someday, when my children look back at these very strange years, they’ll understand how everyone did their part: Health care professionals saved lives, frontline workers delivered vital goods, and Mom made weird faces on Zoom and dubbed it art. ​🎵