It Isn’t Easy Not Being Green

There was this pink springtime frog hanging around the newly budding park down by our river. He wasn’t one colour of pink either! His spots were a deep cherry colour, and what is even more odd is that his eyes were robin’s egg blue. In case your interested his name Harvey Hoopla and he was quite a hustler, or so he thought. After all how far can a pink frog go?

Like I was saying, he lived in our park where the newly budding leaves are showing their chartreuse tips and the willows wisp down to the water. There other frogs living around the same park, but they were the conventional colour, like old Haricot Vert who accidentally came over from the other side in some careless mam’selles steamer trunk with nothing but a bottle of brandy and a round of brie cheese to sustain him.


Haricot, who sounded suspiciously like Charles Boyer, was proud of his conventionality, but whoever heard of a frog that wore a blue silk beret? Nevertheless he took a ridiculous exception to the colourful Harvey Hoopla. It would have helped Harvey if he could have reserved his tongue for catching flies, but somebody named Hoopla is not going to be the soul of discretion.

The truth is that neither of these two recognized in each other the essential value they both had for the whole frog community. Of course you might know that the frog community didn’t recognize the value of either of them and began to grow exceedingly tired of frogs that didn’t conform.

The truth is that the mundane ordinary frogs were outclassed by Haricot and Harvey, and outclassed frogs generally have no class at all. Surprisingly they came up with an idea. Taking a collection they bought Haricot Vert a one way ticket to Paris, and when Harvey wasn’t looking they bound him in Haricot’s hat box with only a six pack and a pound of American cheese slices to ward off starvation.

The predictable result is that the frog community is now of interest only to other frogs, and common mundane ordinary frogs are only interested in flies, six packs, and going birrup!