Caspar Babypants in person

After Oggie's obsession with Caspar Babypants'  Sing Along! CD song collection, it was only natural that we don't miss the chance to meet the musician in person when he is in town.

Caspar (Chris Ballew of The Presidents of the United States of America) was at Powell's City of Books with his wife Kate Endle, doing a story time of their latest book Augie to Zebra.

Kate's illustrations are fabulous, my first intro to her style was the cover of the Sing Along! CD, and she has an etsy store to sell her print as well.

They are both so unassuming and easy to talk to, very sociable and thoroughly professional. I was glad to have met them and talked to them briefly.

Turns out Augie in the book is Caspar's son's name and sure enough it was interesting when Oggie introduced himself as "Oggie" to Caspar eliciting a, "No Way! That's my son's name too!"

The book Augie to Zebra has short alliterative sentences for each letter of the alphabet, with a name, an animal and an action. Like, Josie jams with jaguars, Pasquale paints with panda and so on. The names were interesting, drawn from around the world, as were the animals.

They also read from their other books, set to music, sung by Caspar. It was a short presentation, at the end of which they had a Q&A session where kids asked all sorts of questions which they answered with care and humor. Og's question was "How do you sing?" which was artfully answered by Caspar.

And that was not all, Caspar was performing his popular songs later that afternoon, which we couldn't miss. My favorite I Want To Be A Snowman and Og's favorite Butterfly Driving A Truck were performed, among other favorites, to a wonderfully bouncy audience made up equally of kids and adults.

We did manage to get a copy of his CD autographed.

After jamming with Nirvana and Pearl Jam, it must've been quite a transformation to create a different kind of music that appeals so much to the kids, but is unlike the banal and boring songs that is promoted under the kids' music genre...

What impressed me the most was how they were both doing what they love to do and are so good at it. They hung in there, through ups and downs and continued to follow their heart, their passion and bring joy to so many others.