Songs for Saturday: The Bears

Since I recently prompted a wonderful poem: "The Bear Spectacle", in ysabetwordsmith's recent Poetry Fishbowl!, this seems like a good time to post about The Bears.

The Bears are a suite of two songs: my semi-autobiographical "A Talk With the Middle-Sized Bear", and Naomi Rivkis's wonderful parody of it, "A Tribute to the Middle-Aged Bear". We (or I, if I'm performing solo) usually do them together. You sort of have to do that with the really good parodies, otherwise lines have a tendency to leak from one to the other, and either hilarity or havoc ensues.

The best (ok, only) recording of the two of them together is part of my Fan GOH concert at Baycon 2010.

The Middle-Sized Bear is one of my favorite characters in Cordwainer Smith's story, Mark Elf. You'll find out all about him in the last section, titled "Conversation with the Middle-Sized Bear". He formed part of my "Mandelbear" persona on the old newsgroup alt.callahans, but it was only a few years ago that I discovered that he was also a large part of my personality as well.