This is my 13th FAMW! (unbelieveable)

For this year, I'm going to do something different. For the past two months I've been writing a musical and trying the songs out at a local virtual open mike. I'm going to post each of the songs in order. So far there are 11 songs, so I need to write 3 more to get to 14 for February.

The musical is called, "Yuge", and it's a retelling of the Charles Dickens "Christmas Carol", about President Yuge.

---previously---

Mike has been performing around New England for over 20 years, including three times at the Boston Folk Festival. He has opened for Kevin So, David Roth, Les Sampou, Richard Berman, Dave Crossland, Terry Kitchen, Amy Petty, Hungrytown (Rebecca Hall and Ken Anderson) and Michael Troy. With others he has opened for Chris and Meredith Thompson, Marc Douglas Berardo, Ferron and Terence Martin. He has been fortunate to play mandolin, guitar, or sing harmony at concerts, coffeehouses, festivals, camps, and open mikes with a number of people, including Guy Davis, Kate Campbell, Bennett Hammond, John Kirk, Mary Flower, Patti DeRosa, Beth DeSombre, and many others.

Mike's humorous original songs and parodies cover a wide range of topics from himself ("The Hunk" and "Mando Tango") to the entire country ("If We Only Had a Brain"). In between are excursions into the world of natural science ("Tofu, the Vegan Killer Whale"), literature ("Daddy, Who's Mark Twain?"), automated phone systems ("1-800-CONFESS"), women's health ("Mammogram, M'am?"), sports ("Red Sox Dream"), parts of the human anatomy ("Colonoscopy"), and, of course, his raging ego ("It Is, In Fact, All About Me").

He has been deemed an "accomplished amateur" by Marilyn Rae Beyer, the music director of WUMB, Boston Folk Radio, and Tom Paxton commented that at least one of his songs was "not bad". Anne Hills called the song 1-800-CONFESS "brilliant".