Bear essentials

It started even before we were married. Denise was going in to the hospital in Wisconsin for thyroid surgery, and I was stuck out here in Oregon, with teaching commitments and no money for airfare. So I went down to Woolworths (it was that long ago), picked up a little blue teddy bear and a two-dollar kid's doctor kit--bag, plastic stethoscope, reflector and, I think, reflex hammer. Made a little official-looking name tag that said "Dr. Christiaan Bearnhard, Cuddliologist." Sent him off to join her in hospital.

She responded with a bear for me, a brown and white one we named Olaf Buttonnose, after a character in a Science Fiction story. After we married, we starting picking up other bears, mostly Chosun Sammy pattern--big head, round belly, big feet. Each got a name and a personality.

They joined the business our first Holiday Market. After a year of struggling to sell at Saturday Market, but with low buy-in cost--we shared a booth, so our weekly fee was $5 plus 10%--we committed to the smallest available space, a 6x8 foot booth, for the entire run of Holiday Market. I don't remember what the booth fee was, just that it seemed a huge risk with no guarantee we'd even make the money back.

With that much stress, we needed some support besides each other, so took along a couple of teddy bears, to clutch to instead of each other (bears don't bruise), and distract ourselves if sales were slow.

We soon found other uses for them. Distracting crying babies. Amusing childlike adults. And my favorite: you know the kind of browser who refuses to make eye contact? They sweep their gaze along the shelves on one side of the booth, along the bench display and up the other side, never looking at the vendor for fear we might sell them something? Well, a teddy bear held in the crook of the elbow, just above counter height does wonders. Just make sure it waves at them as their eyes sweep by, preferably with an oversized hind foot.

This can have either of two results. They can laugh, look up, and start treating me like a human being, or they can stomp off in a huff. So really, no down sides.

By the next spring, the bears had become an established fixture in the booth, and when our booth partner, Kathy Lee (Useful Pots, with a Winnie-the-Pooh logo) retired from Market and I painted a new sign, I kept the bear.

So for years, they've bravely accompanied us to art fairs and Markets; we even started getting asked for as "those bear people." They were the unsung heroes of Off Center Ceramics. Until one Thanksgiving Friday.

Okay, some personal history. I used to be a children's storyteller, on a radio show in Wisconsin called "Earticklers." I'd roll into the studio every month or two with some new stories to record, sit in the booth and see if I could make the engineer laugh. One of the hosts was dating a musician, who in fact had written and performed the show's theme song. She'd been trying to convince him to write more children's music, but he resisted, saying he didn't have any ideas. So one day, she said, "Why don't you and Frank get together?"

Two albums later... yep, we wrote and recorded two albums of kid's music before (and slightly after) I left for Oregon. You can still find My Brother Eats Bugs and When I'm Feeling Silly at Hans' website.

Which goes a long way to explaining why, half awake that November morning, I found myself launching into The Song of the Marketing Bear.

The lyrics have been buried at my website for years now, but this fall, local guitarist Larry Pattis convinced me that it was time to actually record the thing and put it out into the world. And so here it is:

The dog days of December

The bears got a day off from Market last weekend.

The story behind the dogs: many years ago, Denise's grandmother was in a nursing home, slowly declining with Alzheimer's. She'd largely regressed to childhood when I met her, and was always asking after her dog. This was in the early 90's, and mental health animals were not yet a thing in Appleton, Wisconsin, so Denise and I suggested getting her a stuffed dog. Her mom wound up getting two, so Adalia could have one while the other went through the wash (she would sneak it spoonfuls of breakfast when the caregivers weren't looking).

After Adalia died, the doggies came home to Del and Mary, and, eventually, to us. They've been hanging out with the bears in the bedroom for a while now, and it occurred to me that they'd never come to Market. So Saturday, the bears got a day off, and we discovered that stuffed puppies are just as effective at distracting fussing children.

Denise couldn't remember what her Grandma's dog was named, so we decided to call them Barkley... and Wagner.