Frog on Stage

They say not to share the stage with animals or children, because they will always upstage you, but sometimes you don’t have a choice. Last night my band had a gig at the retirement home where one of our fiddlers lives. We had a goodly crowd come to hear us, including visitors, and I was surprised how many people from my OTHER choir were there. (Of course, now it is sort of my ex-choir, since I didn’t sing with them at all this past year.) Things were going well, and I thought we sounded particularly good, but I had a little stage fright over having to introduce rags and bluegrass. That went fine too – I just gave a summary of what I’d found on Wikipedia about each genre. We were in the middle of a rag when I saw something very small hopping across the stage. I looked more closely and saw it was a tiny frog! How did it get in? We were nowhere near an outside door – the stage is deep inside the building. I could tell my bandmates also saw it, but we just kept playing. Once the song was over, I announced, “We have a special guest on stage,” and a bunch of people in the audience laughed, so they must have seen the frog too. It hid under a guitar case, but when it came back out, an audience member who had fashioned her program into a kind of cone like what you’d get French fries in scooped up the frog and took it outside, and everyone cheered. We actually play a Norwegian song that translates to “Little Frogs,” but it wasn’t on the program, so unfortunately we did not pull it out. It would have been perfect! It’s a kids’ song about how little frogs have no ears or tails.

Famous Hat