2008 Spring/Summer Tour - Day 17

I had a show today at the Glen Avon library in Riverside. When I booked the show months ago, my contact there, Shirley, had called back and talked to Roseann to say that my show was scheduled in place of their usual bilingual storytime, and might I be able to do some kind of Spanish song? And also, might I do something to give a plug to the upcoming Catch the Reading Bug summer reading program? Roseann told her I could probably learn "La Cucaracha", which would cover both things, and I thought, sure, that's fine. But I didn't give much thought to that again until this past week when I checked my notes for that show and realized, um, I've got to learn "La Cucaracha". I went online and surprisingly had a tough time finding the right lyrics for that... apparently there are a few different versions of that, some of which involve smoking marijuana and other things not exactly fit for an audience of kids. But in any case, I got the words and practiced, with Roseann coaching me on my pronunciation (Spanish is not a language I can pronounce all that well...). I sang it over and over in the shower before the show and figured I had it down alright, and we had made up our own simple verse in English for the bridge part that I felt pretty confident about.

When we got to the library, I met Shirley, and when I told her that I learned "La Cucaracha", she said, "Oh, we actually have someone coming in another day to do a bilingual thing in place of today, so you don't need to do anything different than your regular show." I really should have taken her up on that, but at that point I felt like, eh, I learned it, I might as well do it. It turned out to be quite a mess, though... Of the four times I went through the main verse I got the words and pronunciation right maybe once. I really hope I didn't end up saying something inappropriate by accident through a mispronunciation. I remembered the words okay for the English bridge part, but I totally missed the notes and though I kept my smile throughout, I was cringing inside and I could see Roseann cringing on the outside and shaking her head in disbelief. I had also tried to incorporate some kind of audience participation thing by setting up the song and saying that whenever you see a cockroach, you have to do "the cockroach dance", meaning you stomp really hard on the floor. This was supposed to be some kind of "cha cha cha" thing to put a button after every verse line, but I was having so much trouble making sure I was remembering and pronouncing the words right that I really couldn't demonstrate that sufficiently for the kids to follow. It ended up being a bunch of random stomping, which may have actually covered up some of my horrible performance of the song, so I guess it might have worked out okay.

Other than that... the show went very well. It was a very small audience, maybe 20-25 kids, but they were a fun group. Shirley said that in her 11 years of doing kids' programs that it was one of the best shows she'd seen, so that made me very happy. She must have left the room for "La Cucaracha", I guess...

After the show we went back to LeAnn's and Danny cooked some barbecue Crabby Patties (hamburgers), which were very good. The girls played for a while and watched the movie Robots (an underrated movie that compares to Pixar's films, in my opinion). Roseann and LeAnn went out shopping for a while and worked on some stuff at home while I put the girls to bed.

Apparently, sometime today some neighborhood kids started beating up on the RV... We ended up with a baseball sized dent in the top side corner and another baseball sized split in the spare tire's vinyl cover. LeAnn is pretty sure she knows which kids did it and is going to talk to their parents about it. It'll probably be about $30 to replace the vinyl cover and another $30 for a fiberglass repair kit for the dent, and then we'll have to recover that with some of the leftover vinyl sticker pieces we have. I guess it could have been worse...

On a final note, today was the debut of our new GPS unit (a Tom Tom One which we got from Amazon.com for $140), and I have to say... I really wish I had this thing three years ago when we first started driving around to do shows. I love it! I was toying with the idea of getting the voice module where John Cleese insults you, or the Stephen Hawking voice, but we just went with one of the free lady voices. That'll have to do for now... I really like how I can be somewhere and veer off of the path to drive around aimlessly looking for a pizza place or whatever, and not really have to worry about finding my way back, because it will always find a way to get me there. Sweet!

One of the non-"La Cucaracha" moments of the show...