For the Love of the Frog Girl

by Faro King

This is not a typical love story. It is a tale of a one-sided unrequited love between an almost-three-year-old boy and a much older woman, an amazing creature known to me only as Frog Girl.

Photography by valho

I only met the frog-girl one time and never saw her again, but I never forgot about her my entire life. I doubt that she remembered me in the moment of time that passed by after our meeting.

It was in the fall of the year, I recall. As I look back to that time, I now know, it was in late October. There was a big flurry of activity at home and my mother was busy making dozens and dozens of orange or black frosted cupcakes for the school Harvest Festival. I do remember that she was concerned about making half of them with black frosting. She was looking for some method that hopefully would not turn the inside of the children’s mouths black, but that was not possible. It was rather amusing, even at my level of understanding. Now you must keep in mind, I was a soon to be three year old, and I was thinking as a three year old. I thought having a black mouth was desirable. I was also lusting after the big bags of tiny black cats, jack-o’-lanterns and witches —plastic cake toppers that had arrived days earlier from The Oriental Trading Company.

Unless you know exactly how to make it, black frosting is not so easy to accomplish and my mother was and is a perfectionist about such details. Finally, after consulting with three of the neighborhood ladies, Bet, Pat and Dot, they got it together. They succeeded after making dark chocolate frosting and then adding an entire small vial of blue food coloring to it. We kids all hung around in the kitchen hoping for free samples and we ultimately got it after promising to wash all the dishes afterward.

There were other unusually exciting things going on at home as well. My oldest brother, who never liked to do anything the rest of us were doing, was having a fit over having to get dressed up like a beat nick. Mother was lighting a kitchen match and burning a cork stopper with it, in order to make some lamp-black for a beard and moustache for him. He was spewing his nine year old’s brand of petty hate but allowing her to make him up anyway. He had the lead part in a stage play at the festival.

The next thing I can recall about the day I met the Frog Girl is, we were in the school’s old (smelly) cafeteria, setting up our table and game. My dad had made a big plywood facade with several holes of differing sizes cut in it with a skill saw, and mom had painted it up on one side with funny colorful animals, using the holes for their mouths. She and a neighbor lady friend had also made piles of cloth bean bags which were filled with dried peas or pinto beans. The prize at our set up was the cupcakes that mom had made.

So, I was instructed to sit on the inside seat at the table, and to keep my fingers out of the cupcake icing, and just “be quiet”. I think that I used to talk an awful lot back then, and probably now, too. But, I saw frog-girl when she first entered the auditorium. I did not know that frog-girl was an actual human female. All I saw and recognized was a wonderful frog creature walking on two legs with a great big smiling face. I could not take my eyes off that frog! To make my life even more enchanted than it already was that night, frog-girl and friends Casper the Ghost and Minnie Mouse were headed directly toward ME! I was most likely sitting there in awe, mouth hanging agape, staring at wonderful green human sized frog.

When frog-girl and her entourage of friends got close enough, she asked the lady with her if she could have a cupcake from my table! (I was likely bouncing up and down by now) and my mom gave frog-girl a nice orange cupcake with a black cat on top. Frog-girl sat down on the bench at the other side of my table, and with her back to me, I could see a long blonde pony tail in the back. I had NO idea frogs could grow such long ponytails!

Then, this wonderful frog turned toward me and lifted up the frog face… and there was a GIRL inside froggie! She had to be so much older than I, at least 7, maybe 8 years old. This did not scare me as much as it did intrigue me. I was almost three years old and had not seen costumes before, not that I could remember, anyway.

I know that I stared at Frog-girl for as long as three or four minutes while she ate the cupcake my mother had made, and then she and her grown up got up and walked away. I never saw her again that night, and never knew who she was. I don’t think the girl was much more than a vehicle for something much greater than either she or myself. Because I never forgot that costume, or that feeling of the weird unknown, when something spell binding comes into your life and changes it forever. That night, I became one of THEM… the Autumn People.

Later I asked my mother if she had seen the big frog. She said that she had been too busy to notice anyone like I described to her. But through much “research” and watching and listening to the older kids, I learned much.

Every year without exception, I searched for her, never again seeing or hearing about a Frog-girl. I also became a big fan of costumes… and about the world of illusion. Maybe you’re born with it - Maybe it’s Halloween.