Cedar Crest	UPDATED: Friday, February 29, 2008
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The singer and the monsignor

Posted on Friday, February 29, 2008

By Joel Keller
THE ERICKSON TRIBUNE

During her live performances, Carmel Quinn likes to tell the story of how, before doing a benefit for her friend, Monsignor Vincent Puma, she needed transportation.

Puma told her that he’d send her a limousine to shuttle her to the benefit. “So I said to him, ‘I’m not showing up in a limo to raise money for the poor!’” she recounts in a lilting Irish brogue. “He said, ‘You’ll be ok. Just call this number.’” When she called the number, the person on the other end of the phone answered, “Scillieri Funeral Parlor.”

Puma continues the story. “When they said Scillieri Funeral Parlor, she had a heart attack,” he laughs. “‘We’re supposed to pick you up,’ he said. The story goes that he also said, ‘Don’t worry you can either sit or lay down flat.’”

It is such affection that has sustained a friendship between the two for over 20 years. And it is because of the monsignor’s efforts that Quinn has been entertaining capacity audiences at Cedar Crest for the last five years, including her most recent performance, which was on January 19 at the performing arts center in the Belmont Clubhouse.

Discovered Irish talent
Quinn is best known for her six-year stint on Arthur Godfrey and His Friends, where she not only sang Irish favorites and other standards, but she discussed what was going on in her life with Godfrey and the studio audience.

Godfrey is, in fact, the person who discovered her. She won his Talent Scouts show in 1954—”It was bigger than American Idol, except it wasn’t as noisy,” she explains—which gave her a three-day stint on Godfrey’s main show. She proved to be so popular that he offered her a job, and she moved from her native Ireland to work on the show. Since Godfrey’s show ended, she’s taken her act on the road, appearing as a guest on many talk shows over the decades, ranging from Jack Paar’s Tonight Show to Regis and Kathie Lee.

Carmel Quinn

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Quinn met Puma, who has been a resident at Cedar Crest since 2003, in the mid 1980s, when he asked her to do a benefit for Eva’s Village, a Paterson, N.J.-based outreach center Puma helped start in 1983.

Making audiences come alive
Puma was on Cedar Crest’s original entertainment committee, and he didn’t hesitate to suggest that they add Quinn to the schedule. When she first came to perform at Cedar Crest, she was “surprised” to see that her old friend was living there. Ever since, he’s become a big topic during her performances there. “She picks up on everything. She’s funny as hell. She always beats me up on stage,” Puma says good-naturedly.

From the first performance, though, she has enjoyed the audiences that come out to see her at the retirement community. “God bless [them]; those are our fans. And there’s so many of them,” she says. Because she gets so many repeat audience members, she makes the effort to make each performance unique. “I tell ya, there are people who have seen her two, three times, and they tell me it’s something different [every time],” says Puma.

Puma loves how much audiences at Eva’s Village and Cedar Crest enjoy Quinn’s performances. “Her capacity to make an audience come alive is unbelievable,” he says. “She makes the audience stand on its feet. I have no doubt that she’s the best.”

According to Quinn, though, the monsignor deserves just as much praise. “He’s a terrific, terrific person,” she says. “I can’t speak highly enough about him.”