Our neighbors called yesterday morning to invite us to last night’s Zoo Tunes concert. Old Crow Medicine Show was playing with the Be Good Tanyas, neither of which bands we were very familiar with, but it was the last concert of this summer’s Zoo Tunes series and the weather was perfect so we decided to make an evening of it.

Old Crow Medicine Show

The music was good—not something we would likely purchase a recording of, but great live music. Of course, we typically enjoy any live band with an upright bass (and the banjo’s a bonus). Anyway, all was going well until a young girl (5ish) suddenly appeared on our picnic blanket and started loving-on and trying to cradle Charlie. Cute for about one minute, but it very quickly became not ok. I would have expected the mom behind us (owner of this girl) to quickly speak up and intervene. But no. Instead, she sat squeamishly back there trying to ignore the situation. So this girl sat on our blanket, read Charlie’s books played with his toys and continued to run her grubby little fingers through his hair, all while trying to clean some ball-point-pen-markings off her arms with her own spit. She soon shifted focus and ended up planting herself in Jon’s (30-year-old-male’s) lap. This IS the 21st century and although I don’t think he looks all that threatening, as a rule-of-thumb, Jon tries avoid any sort of contact with other people’s children—especially complete strangers (and when I say strangers, I mean STRANGErs). So when this little girl ended up rolling around in his lap, he was left in an extremely uncomfortable situation—in a large crowd of people, mind you.

this would have been cute…
…if we knew who the hell she was.

She eventually worked her way back to her parents and disappeared for a while. Not long after, we turned around to see her sloppily eating an ice-cream cone (much like a typical 5-year-old would)..and not long after that she was back on OUR blanket again. Only this time she had half of her ice-cream cone smeared around her mouth and down the front of her shirt…and what did she want to do? give Charlie hugs and kisses, of course. Again, NOT OK—for many reasons. We tried to drop hints like "You know what, I think your mom is looking for you", as we turned around to see her mom completely engaged in conversation and once again completely ignoring her overly-friendly daughter . I’m not sure what ultimately got the point across, as I took this as the perfect opportunity to excuse myself and hit the beer garden, but Jon tells me it was when he loudly said, "You need to leave us alone and go find your mom."—Loud enough for her mom to hear.

Did I mention the music was good?