The Frog Prince

The first real story is up. It's "The Frog Prince."

When I was a little girl, I used to have a nightmare based on this story, in which I was in a dungeon under my house and there was a giant frog in a cage that I was being forced to kiss.
I now have a frog hand puppet who was my "date" to a party where I was the princess in this story.

It's an old story. In many versions, instead of kissing the frog, the princess throws him against the wall of her bedchamber, and he turns into a prince upon landing. I believe this is the original version. I used the kissing version of the story because it's the one I grew up with, and the one I know best. The age of the princess is kind of uncertain. She's young enough to still want to play outside with her golden ball, but old enough to be able to conjure up an image of a handsome prince. There are some people who say that this story is about the trauma of coming-of-age, of that transition from innocence (the frog) to sexual awareness (the prince). It makes sense then for the princess to be somewhere around 13 or so, but I didn't worry about that too much.

With all my stories, (and my tours) I start with a general idea of the main beats of the story, and the rest really is just improvisation. This, I think, is part of what makes oral storytelling such a great art form. Telling (or listening to) a story that's hundreds of years old connects us to our past, and it's familiar, but yet we can each put our own spin on that story. That's what keeps it fresh and new, and lets us explore different ideas and implications in each story, while still maintaining the ideas and themes that have made the story resonate with generations of people.

Which brings me to a copyright notice- my written words here are copyrighted. I own no copyright over any story that I tell unless otherwise noted, because they're all part of some oral tradition somewhere. So if I tell a story you've never heard before, and you want to tell it, you're welcome to do so. What you're not welcome to do is reproduce my telling in whole or in part and claim it as your own (if you want to burn it to a CD and send it to a friend, that's a horse of a different color).