Open Mike

On Friday, Northwest Public Radio descended on The Green Frog in Palouse for their Open Mike night to celebrate the birthday of our colleague, Nate Prudhon. Here he is blowing out the candles on his cake with the help of Serena.

Tiana, one of the co-owners of TGF made this delicious chocolate cake covered with frosting, almonds and a drizzle of kahlua. It was fabulous! Happy Birthday Nate!

This was a particularly great Open Mike. There were a wide variety of singers and instrumentalists and we even had some comedy. Open Mike at the Frog always opens with Tiana. She writes and performs her own songs and is a great personality. She had Sueann Ramella laughing from the very beginning. Here Sueann is throwing out some Open Mike attitude!

Eric is one of my favorites. He has a really nice voice and plays both the guitar and the banjo. He does a version of "Stayin' Alive" that actually gave me a whole new appreciate for disco!

I went up to ask him if he would play "Happy Birthday" when we brought in Nate's cake and he invited me to sing "Fly Me to the Moon" with him. I was so caught off guard that I didn't do a very good job but it was fun anyway and hopefully I'll get another chance in July.

These two men were hysterical! I heard someone say their names but people were laughing so hard that I didn't catch them so will have to ask Tiana. The guy on the right played the guitar while the red-headed guy with the beard played some kind of laptop xylophone and told jokes. There was something about the sound of the xylophone, the guitar and his one or two sentence jokes that went over really well. They need to take this on the road.

Personally, I think that the non-blue humor worked better than some of the bluer and/or more scatalogical references, but I tend to think that blue humor is the easier kind of humor. What he did for most of the time was very clever.

Here's another one of my somewhat blurry (I'm still getting used to my new camera!) photographs with Chuck, Sarah and Laura. Gillian is hiding off to their right.

There's some pretty impressive musical talent in those three. Sarah McDaniel you go girl! I heard her singing some nice harmony, Chuck was doing harmony and melody and has a great voice and our very own Laura was the belle of the ball!

She did an a capella version of a song from "The Color Purple" what rocked the house! This woman is an entertainer!!!!! She needs to be on Broadway!

Here's Paul, Eric, Terri and Janet doing Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" with the audience joining in.

Janet plays the melodica, flute, recorder and pennywhistle and probably a handful of other instruments as well.

Paul, who is part of Steptoe, seems to play about every instrument known to man. Okay, maybe that's a slight exaggeration but I've seen and heard him play the guitar, violin, mandolin, banjo and harmonica. Well, it was another great Open Mike at The Green Frog. You should really come and check it out for yourself on the first Friday of every months. See you there!