No. 839 – Kiss That Frog

Performer: Peter Gabriel

Songwriter: Peter Gabriel

Original Release: Us

Year: 1992

Definitive Version: The studio version. It rollicks along much better than any live version I’ve heard, which almost makes it unique.

When you’re rebounding, it almost goes without saying that you tend to do some dumb things. I don’t have any funny walks-of-shame stories to relate, unfortunately. The dumbest thing I did in Flint after Jenna and I parted company was try the newspaper-classified dating game.

This was before the Internet got rolling, so there was no Match.com or anything like that, where I know a couple of success stories. As far as I know, no one’s ever had any success through the newspaper classifieds. Think: Craigslist. You’re just lucky if you don’t get knifed.

Most of the time, I never heard from anyone I called. There was one ad where the female was talking about being romanced like a fairytale princess, and I thought a clever response would be to play off that with my message with this song in the background: Kiss That Frog. You know, “kiss that frog and you will get your prince.” And it’s got a killer groove anyway. I wrote down my spiel and cut up the song appropriately. I must have spent a full day working on the recording before I called up and played it on her voice mail.

I never heard from her.

My biggest success, or failure if you look at it that way, was a woman who in her ad said essentially that she was a babe. That’s enough for me. And lo and behold, she responded! I’m not sure if it was the second conversation we had or the first, but it didn’t take long for her to reveal that even if she looked like Salma Hayek, she was an ugly person.

But what do your loins care if she’s an ignorant, racist moron? If she looks good, it’s all good for a very short-term relationship, if you know what I mean. So I tried to set up a meeting, and she reluctantly agreed. I guess I should have seen what was coming next, but I still was surprised when she stood me up. Oh well. Sometimes a frog is just a frog.