Updated at 10:56 a.m. on Monday, March 16, 2026
George Swartz is perfectly comfortable dressing up as a gorilla in a tutu, a unicorn or a tighty-whitey-clad Cupid in public.
“The gorilla in a tutu is a classic, it's the most popular,” Swartz told CPR News.
Swartz, who also goes by the name Orange Peel Moses, delivers singing telegrams as a career. He takes customer requests and surprises his targets with surprise songs for birthdays, anniversaries, break-ups and even funerals.
“I’m honored to be continually asked to participate in all of these occasions and enhance them as much as I can,” he said.
The first singing telegram was delivered in 1933 by Western Union. The company originally connected the country with telegraph wires but is now best known for its wire money transfer service. Although there was an attempt to bring back a modern version of the telegrams with some star power in 2011, the effort faded away.
However, singing telegrams continue to live on in viral social media videos and, in Denver, with Swartz.
“I am a devoted servant in this joyful service business,” he said.
Swartz has been delivering singing telegrams since he was a college student at the University of Colorado Boulder. His first paid gig was in 2004, and in the years since, he’s witnessed the full range of human emotion while singing in various costumes.
“If you do 5,000 of anything, you're going to have a variety of experiences,” he said.
Swartz’s performer name, Orange Peel Moses, came to him in a dream while he was a resident advisor at CU Boulder.
“I was waking up from a nap and I was still in that kind of delta brainwave state,” he said. “The phrase ‘Orange Peel Moses’ was in my mind from whatever I had been doing while I was sleeping.”
But he’s had an affinity for all things orange since high school, when he picked up a magazine article on color psychology.
“It said that orange was the color of eternal youth, and then it was an appetite stimulator and a mood enhancer,” he said. “I just instantly resonated with all those things and I decided that that was the point of no return.”
Swartz has some loyal customers, like Barefoot Public Relations. He’s been delivering telegrams there for the past nine years.
“It's something to look forward to,” Sarah Hogan, the agency’s co-founder, told CPR News. “This is our fourth employee we've done it with.”
It’s a tradition for Hogan and Cori Streetman, the company’s other co-founder, to order Swartz’s services for employees on their five-year work anniversary.
On a cold and sunny January day, Swartz’s target this time was Tara Riseley. She’s a senior design specialist at Barefoot PR.
“I knew it was coming for me…” she said.
Swartz sang multiple songs, including “Ripple” by the Grateful Dead. Riseley and Streetman hugged and cried while Swartz sang.
When asked why the song impacted her so much, Riseley said, “More than ever we need music, in schools and life and public radio, just all the things.”
Riseley’s "workiversary" was a few days after federal immigration officers shot and killed a man, Alex Pretti, on the streets of Minneapolis. She heard an NPR news segment on a brass band that formed after George Floyd was killed, and that the piece resonated with her.
“Slowly people started coming out of the woodwork to participate, and now they are part of the protests, bringing music and singing to diffuse situations that can get really tense,” she said. “That speaks to me. I appreciate the work that people are doing to bring music to the world.”
When Swartz sang “Here Comes the Sun,” by The Beatles, the whole team ended up joining in.
Swartz said that getting people to sing together is one of the things he enjoys most about this job.
“Most people are pretty happy to join in because they don't feel like they're the center of attention,” he said.
Even though he’s done this thousands of times, he said he isn’t bored of it.
“Why would I ever stop when I get to be a part of all these incredible memories?” he said. “That's one of the reasons why I'll even sing the traditional Happy Birthday song every time, because I want people to be able to sing together.”
Editor's note: A previous version of this story misspelled Cori Streetman's name.
