Museum Story Time: Piggies in a Polka by Kathi Appelt

Date: Friday, October 6, 2023

Time: 10:30 a.m. EST

Location: The Learning Center, Birthplace of Country Music Museum

Cost: Free and open to the public

Join us in the museum’s Learning Center for our monthly Museum Story Time program. Aimed at toddler-age children and their grown-ups, we will gather on the first Friday of each month for a music- or Appalachia-related storybook, a tune or two by WBCM Radio Bristol show host Ella Patrick, and a related activity or coloring sheet.

This month we will be reading Hello Crow written by Jeff Daniel Marion and illustrated by Leslie Bowman.

About Piggies in a Polka

It’s time for the annual holler hootenanny, and these little piggies know how to party! “The drummer piggy hits a groove,/ he keeps the polka beat./ It’s a hoopy-shoopy rhythm/ and the pigs all stomp their feet,” writes Appelt (Oh My Baby, Little One). The star of the barn dance is Porcina, a Rubenesque chanteuse whose high notes make “all the bachelor piggies sigh.” But the real show is in Pham’s (Before I Was Your Mother) suedelike, digital illustrations. She crowds the barn floor with ecstatic couples—and an occasional singleton—carried away by the music and merrymaking (in one scene, a pig can be spotted floating in the punch bowl; throughout, a duck quacks with abandon). Hues of rose and gold emanate from the footlights and lanterns, bouncing off the walls and illuminating the angular planes of the pigs’ plump bodies. Investing her porcine participants with an individual personality, Pham makes the pages pulsate with the heady crush and buzz of a joint that’s jumpin’. Ages 3-7.

About the Author

Kathi Appelt is the author of the Newbery Honoree, National Book Award finalist, and bestselling The Underneath as well as the National Book Award finalist The True Blue Scouts of Sugar Man Swamp, Maybe a Fox (with Alison McGhee), Keeper, and many picture books including Counting Crows and Max Attacks. She has two grown children and lives in College Station, Texas, with her husband.