The USO was in town Saturday to help raise money for the Memorial Day Parade.

By  Max W. Lauf

The USO Liberty Bells and “celebrity impressionist” Joey Voices performed Saturday night at a benefit fundraiser for the Somerville Memorial Day parade. Several dozen veterans arrived by bus to attend the event, which took place at the Somerville High School Auditorium.

The woman from the USO drew consistent applause and nostalgic sighs of recognition from the crowd with renditions of 1940’s chart toppers, including “My Boyfriend’s Back” and “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy.” The Bells graciously bantered with the audience during multiple sound engineering-related errors that caused their musical accompaniment to play out of sequence, finishing the first half of the evening with anthems from each branch of the US armed services.

Joey Voices’ comedy careened from off-color observations to an anecdote about strapping small explosives to his G.I. Joe action figures before launching into a confessional account of his conversion to Christianity. Voices supplemented his monologues with impersonations of actors and musicians, which were universally well-received. Voices delivered a back-to-back-to-back Robert DeNiro, Joe Pesci, and Al Pacino, sang a bowdlerized “Cocaine,” the lyrics altered to address hair loss, and concluded his act by donning a white g-string over his pants and parading through the aisles with a microphone, belting out Cher’s “If I Could Turn Back Time.”