While people throughout the world enjoy ice cream on a hot summer day, not many can say that they were featured in a concert video eating ice cream in a major North America concert tour. Yet, residents of Oakmont of Valencia were.
Sarah McLachlan’s video montage to her song “Ice Cream,” being played during her “Fumbling Towards Ecstacy 30th Anniversary Tour,” featured various video submissions, including Santa Clarita’s very own Oakmont residents: Marilynn and Arnold Ludwig in one clip and Lois Eisenberg with her daughter Ellen Berlin in another.
McLachlan and her team took to Instagram to ask for submissions, urging fans to submit videos on her official website. McLachlan clarified in a later post that fans didn’t need to worry about singing, just lip syncing to her song.
Megan Town, a longtime McLachlan fan and a sales specialist at Oakmont, discussed how she came up with the idea of including her residents for thousands of concert goers to see.
“I thought it would make them feel special, because even if they don’t know who Sarah McLachlan is, their daughters do. It was a great excuse to have an ice cream social to bribe them all to come down to do it,” Town said. “We printed the words out and I recorded a few snippets of our residents performing.”
Town was surprised to find not just one, but two, of the videos selected during the concert, which took place at the Hollywood Bowl on May 31.
“I had my phone ready the whole time. When I heard those first few notes, I pulled out my phone and started recording. They were big and bold in front of the whole world, and we were very honored and it was just very touching,” Town said. “I started to cry. We had a town hall meeting here two days after and I told the residents that this happened and they just smiled so big.”
Town knew that rehearsals would pay off, and never had a doubt that the residents would be featured.
“These are people in their 80s and 90s. They’re not necessarily going to be huge fans of Sarah McLachlan, they’re not the usual demographic of the fan base. That’s why I thought she would choose us because we’re unusual. I thought, ‘Why wouldn’t she choose us? Of course she’s going to choose us,’” Town said. “It’s the most adorable thing ever.”
