Keith at Irvine Spectrum -- Friday, 16Aug2013

Wow! It was a big night for kids. Right at first I had this tiny baby that was really intrigued by the music guy. She couldn't even talk yet, but her parents are teaching her sign language, and she knows the sign for "more". And she used it at the end of every song to ask for more and more and more until her parents dragged her away. Very cute.

I've been carrying around a small tambourine for a year or two, but haven't really managed to figure out how/when to deploy it. But this time, I had some little girls kind of hanging around, but not dancing -- just sitting on the front of the stage, and for some reason it occurred to me that they might like to play the tambourine. And they *really* did...

But of course, they weren't exactly experts with rhythm yet, so to try to help them catch on, I was stomping my big heavy boot on the stage, so they could feel the beat through their bottoms. And of course, once I'd started the tambourine-ready fast songs, I couldn't stop. I'm clearly way out of shape, 'cuz after 3 or 4 songs, I was exhausted! And it's hard to sing when you're panting (and vice versa)! Anyway, it turned into a big party, and I was having a blast and ended up playing just about every fast song I know. I'm gonna have to bring that thing out more often!

Later on, there was a family that had seen me before and already owned my Kid's CD. They're clearly Not From Around Here, and the little girl came up and asked, in her incomprehensible accent, for something about a princess. Since I couldn't figure it out, her dad jumped up and, in *his* incomprehensible accent, clarified that she wanted "The Indian Princess Song" -- the one I'd written for the Princess campouts, to the tune of "Puff, the Magic Dragon". I was baffled by that because she was clearly not old enough to be one of my Princess fans (they're all teenagers by now), but it's still on the CD, and she knows it from there, so I played the first verse and chorus and then switched to the "Puff" lyrics. It's embarrassing enough to sing the words "I'm an Indian Princess!" at a campout -- at the mall it's mortifying...