The strange world of Mika - Observer - June 12 2009

[dcdeb]

For this Sunday's Observer Music Monthly, Caspar Llewellyn Smith caught up with Mika ahead of his second album and found a strange superstar in the making.

ETA: The article can be found at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/jun/14/mika-pop-music

The Observer

Life in technicolor

Strange as it might sound, the deeply odd Mika looks to be heading for superstardom. From Los Angeles to London and beyond, Caspar Llewellyn Smith follows his coat tails

 

On the second day that I meet Mika we go for a walk on Venice Beach in Los Angeles, which isn't as fabulous as that might sound. La-La Land's own fantasy retreat, which once boasted an amusement park and pleasure pier, is now crowded with tacky souvenir stalls and after four months renting near here, the singer is a little jaded. An unappetising figure in shades and leathers stops him, a stranger who starts talking to him earnestly in French.

"He said he was a songwriter," Mika tells me. "He asked if I'd like any of his songs. But by the look of them, I don't think they'd be any good ... "

Out here he isn't super well known, although he was invited to the Vanity Fair Oscars party two nights earlier, where he was introduced to Madonna, about whom he relates an amusingly salacious, albeit off-the-record story. Does it bother him that he's not molested by fans as he might be back in London or Paris? (Because if you're going to be one of the biggest pop stars on the planet, you're sure to come with an ego to match.) "Are you mad?" he grins, goofily and disarmingly.

 

Start to spend any time in the company of the 25-year-old Mika Penniman and you'll realise that he's quite the oddball. Ambling along the boardwalk, in the late February sun, we talk about the natural beauty of the rest of California, "which is what really appeals to me ... it reminds me of the Lebanon" - this being where he was born. Then he spots a handball court: "Look, it's like fives!" he says, referring to the archaic game still practised at one of his alma maters, Westminster School in London. But his chequered background and difficult upbringing, the strange mixture of fragile diffidence and utter confidence that he displays, his sense of being the eternal outsider: it could be argued that Mika shares the hallmarks of all the great pop performers.

Or it could be argued otherwise. Mika certainly divides opinion - once calling himself a love-it-or-loathe-it "Marmite artist". The Guardian's Alexis Petridis memorably compared listening to his 2007 debut Life in Cartoon Motion to "being held at gunpoint by Bonnie Langford", which alarmingly led to Brian May of Queen leaping to Mika's defence with a blog posting. But the record didn't feel contrived or saccharine to the 5.6 million people around the world who bought it, his audience comprising lots of children and their parents, gay people, a high percentage of women, some worryingly extreme fans and the general public, in general. (In other words, those who are more often than not the early adopters of the best pop.)

Fortunately for him, Mika recognises that he has never been cool and his rise was unfashionably swift. His first interview as a fledgling pop star was with this magazine in August 2006 (OMM36) and by the end of last summer, he had toured the world twice over, climaxing with a spectacularly conceived sell-out show to an audience of 55,000 at the Parc des Princes stadium in Paris.

 

For his detractors, the bad news is that his second album - the recording of which he started in LA following very little holiday (he went gorge walking and scaled a canyon) - will only increase his ubiquity. Due for release in the autumn, it's a more mature album, exploring the theme of what it means to be a teenager and alive to endless possibilities, whereas Life in Cartoon Motion was "very much my schoolyard record". Does that mean it's a more demanding record? Not exactly, because again, it's bursting with melodies and sounds dazzlingly carefree. But hidden depths are lurking. It's worth repeating: Mika is very strange.

When I arrive at the studio of producer Greg Wells in Culver City, near Venice Beach, Mika bounds to the door, 6'3", lithe, wearing a bowler hat, short-sleeved blue shirt, jeans, white plimsolls, no socks and a chunky green fluorescent watch. Most of Life in Cartoon Motion was recorded here, and he is now completing its sequel. He takes me into the small control room, where there is a sign that reads "DO NOT PLAY LOUD, DO NOT HURT MIKA" and where he and Wells are watching the finest horn section for hire in Los Angeles at work on a song called Dr John. It sounds like it could be a single, I say. "No, no, no!" Mika insists.

Just out of the line of sight of trumpet player Jerry Hey and his crew, whose credits include Michael Jackson's Thriller as well as endless Hollywood soundtracks, Mika suggests a change to the part. Wells relays the idea: "Mika's only comment, with which I wouldn't disagree ... is can we make it a bit more loose and a bit more playful, and what about doubling that line at the end?"

Forty-five minutes in, Mika says: "There's another part that I've always heard in there."

"Well, let's get it then," Wells replies.

"I don't want to push them to the end of their tether," says Mika, fastidiously polite and also consistently conscious of costs.

"Don't worry, they're very well paid."

So far, so normal, but now he wants a break and, clutching his mug of PG Tips, tries to explain the genesis of the song. "When you've had too much to drink and you're reminded of things you'd rather forget ... I always wished there was this mystical figure I could talk to. I started to call him Dr John. He's this triangular-shaped, perfect older man with just the right ingredients of madness and humility ... he's got a big white beard and he's covered in feathers that he steals from his pet peacock." Seeing that I look baffled, he adds: "There's this whole world that goes with my songs."

He leads me back to the small front room, where he has fashioned his own creative environment and where I become even more confused. The slogan "Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months" - taken from Oscar Wilde - is pasted on the wall, beside drawings and pages torn from magazines of the work of celebrated contemporary illustrators such as Richard Sala and Tony Millionaire (plus David McKee, author of Mr Benn and the Elmer the elephant books). A bookshelf includes Daniel J Levitin's This is Your Brain on Music and a study of Bach, but mostly it's filled with prewar and 1950s children's books that Mika has spent upwards of $3,000 collecting. "Visual references are very important to me," he says with glee. "I write a bit of a song, I'll do a little drawing, we'll keep the sketch books, it goes from there ... I indulge in the fact that none of it really makes sense to begin with."

Sitting at a table, working on her own illustrations, is Mika's eldest sister Yasmine, who works closely with him on the visual aspect of his records and stage shows (under the alias DaWack). There's a box of cakes that their mum, Joannie, who is staying in Los Angeles for a few days, has just delivered. She makes lots of Mika's stage clothes. In fact, the longer you hang around with Mika, the more it feels as if the entire Penniman family is involved in this project. While he will say to me, months later, "no one knows what I am and really, I wonder if I do, at the end of the day", his oddness inevitably relates to his upbringing.

 

Life in Cartoon Motion, with its bubblegum songs such as his UK No 1 Grace Kelly or Love Today or Lollipop, "contained a lot of childhood references", he says. "The new album is evidently, I think, more adolescent. I wanted to take it to the next place. I thought, 'Where do I want to go back to? Before all this happened, what made me start writing songs? What did I want to capture the first time round that I didn't manage?' Well, I liked that feeling of being 17, 18 years old. I wanted to return to that period. A lot of characters from my first album have grown up and I think the new album contains a lot of contradictions.

"It has joy, it has fragility, it's got a little hint of bitterness - all these things that I felt when I was a teenager," he will add.

With Mika beside me, the impassive studio engineer cues a series of tracks - Blame it on the Girls, which sounds like Prince in his prime; the Pet Shop Boys-redolent Rain; a full-blown ballad, I See You, and a handful more - any of which might frankly be a hit. "It's a big, huge-sounding pop record that sonically references big records from the 80s or the 90s," says Mika. "Yes it's true." But lest that sound too calculating, the influences that he really hammers on about are more diverse: Kurt Weill, for instance, or the 50s singer Patti Page, or the 70s singer-songwriter Harry Nilsson.

"A review of my first record said I had gone through the best hits of different decades and re-written those songs in a very shrewd way," he says. "But I couldn't be insulted because at the time, I hadn't heard a lot of the acts that they mentioned. People would say 'You sound like Roxy Music.' I'd be like, 'Great' and then: 'Who the #### is that?' I don't care because now I know every Roxy Music song that there is to know. I'm a lot more educated now than I was a couple of years ago, but I'm still blissfully ignorant."

He grew up listening to a heterogeneous collection of music - Bob Dylan, Serge Gainsbourg and Lebanese singer Fairuz from his parents, then "pop music in the purest sense of the word, because no matter whether it was a rock song, whether it was a piece of Nina Simone, I could hear the song and I could hear the message in the song and it gave me a certain feeling and it instilled in me this kind of total anti-snobbery.

"I used to love Shabba Ranks," he says, perhaps most surprisingly of all. "I know it's criminal and snobs will look at me and say who the hell does this guy think he is - he's making pop music."

Later, there's a surreal hiatus when celebrated 60s rock photographer Henry Diltz arrives. He leads Mika outside to take pictures for the record label. "With rock bands you normally have to tell a dirty joke to break the ice," Diltz relates with relish. "I told Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young a joke: 'How do you stop a dog from humping your leg?'

"'You pick it up and suck its dick.' And one by one, they all collapsed laughing!"

"Oh ..." Mika says, and smiles ruefully.

Back in the control booth, he plays me what will be the album's first single, We Are Golden, which is gloriously epic and a certain No 1. It features the Andrae Crouch Gospel Choir who "refused to sing the line 'don't give it up when you're young and you want some'," as Mika tells it. "One of them stopped and turned to me and very slowly said: 'You want what? A cheeseburger?'" Which wasn't what he meant. He burrows down into the theme for me: "I've been reading Angela Carter's The Magic Toyshop" - the late novelist's 1967 masterpiece, which follows its heroine's burgeoning sexuality as she lives under the roof of her tyrannical uncle, a toy maker, in south London - "and I've been fascinated by that period in someone's life."

Ah, but he's different. "Once every 15 years, pop brings along someone who's involved in the totality of what they do," says Lucian Grainge, CEO of Universal Records. "Prince or Freddie Mercury or George Michael: they were great writers and singers and performers, and they were interested in the visual aspect, too. Mika is a classic example of that kind of artist.

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"Of course," he adds, "they can be slightly odd people. But their genius is that they communicate that oddness on a mass level."

Later, Mika will slightly rephrase that idea when he wonders aloud: "How do you take a freak and make them a beautiful freak?"

Six weeks later, I visit Mika on an early spring day in London; he is a dual British and American national, but calls Kensington home and his flat is in the basement of the family's grand house. Because he's still out when I arrive, Yasmine lets me in, and her younger sister Paloma, who is Mika's stylist, also says hello. The flat has recently been refurbished, and is bright and immaculate, filled with pieces of art that he has collected, including an original Charles Schulz Peanuts drawing, some Tintin statuettes and a Jim Woodring cartoon, as well as a lot of flowers. "But I'm still living out of storage, really," he says, when he breezes in. He got the flat because his sisters were studying in China for a while "so I did a quick swoop in - when you come from a big family, you learn the art of war and it holds you in good stead for the future". He has a third sister, Zuleika, and a younger brother, Fortune. "When I tell people I still live here they laugh. In the end, maybe I'll find somewhere in the countryside, because I want to follow that nice English tradition of pop stars making vegetables and cheese..." Then he recants: "To tell you the truth, that fills me with horror."

The theatre designer Es Devlin, who staged his Parc des Princes concert (and helped art direct his OMM photoshoot), later tells me that I should have snuck upstairs - "because then you would have seen it's a riot of colour, with different kinds of art everywhere, and you can really see the wealth of influences that he's had." Born in Beirut to his Lebanese mother and American businessman father, he left the country as a baby with his family as the civil war escalated. "But if there's an ounce of Lebanon in your family, it will take over," Mika says, curled up on his white sofa. "Ours is a Lebanese household: there's incense burning; you'll get fed within 10 minutes.

"There's a survival trait, too, and I think that's what's odd about me. In Lebanon, there'll be bombs being thrown, but the restaurants will shut down only when they have to. There's this mentality that if you're going to cry, you stand on the table, throw your hands in the air and scream as loudly as you can and you deal with it. I think it's affected the way I make music: these extremes of emotion."

Following a brief stopover in Cyprus, the family moved to Paris, which is why he is bilingual (and which helps explain why he is especially famous in France). But at the age of nine, and with his father's business temporarily collapsing, their peripatetic journey led them to London. "Because of the moving around, because of the having a lot and then having nothing and then having a little bit and then having nothing... for one thing, I developed this real fear of money. I have a fear of decadence when it comes to creative things, because I think that things that are really good should never cost a lot of money.

"I really didn't want the office life of my father. I didn't want to be rich, I just didn't want to be afraid. It meant that my sisters and I all turned to the arts. We operated as a unit."

In fact, the whole Mika project can be considered a collective act of artistic creation, which, as Devlin says, "is their way of protecting themselves from the outside world". But even among his siblings, Mika required particular protection. His memory is hazy, but he left the Lycée Français Charles de Gaulle after being bullied and falling out with a teacher. That, compounded by his mild dyslexia, led him to stop talking for a few weeks, and his mother schooled him at home for several months, at which point he began to be privately coached by a Russian teacher as a singer and pianist.

"From the age of about 10, my mum made me practise every day. She was extremely tough with me. I think she knew that I would have a hard time in normal situations, maybe more so than my sisters. She realised that my oddness had some sort of purpose. She realised how I was very insular as a child. Socially extremely insular, but creatively, extremely loud. She realised that for me not to end up completely ####ed up, she had to help me.

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"She won't speak to you and this is the first time I've spoken to anyone about this," he says, betraying his diffidence. "But I have a very funny relationship with my mother. It's warts and all, embarrassing as it is."

Even when Mika started at Westminster School, he maintained his performing ambitions, appearing in the 1998 Royal Opera House production of Vaughan Williams's The Pilgrim's Progress. "I was quite fearless, which is odd because at school I was timid and shy," he recalls. "No one knew anything about me at school. I felt I didn't belong there because I'd been bounced around so much. I never took part in the annual band shows. I knew I would get booed off. Isn't that ironic?"

(He says that now he has a tight circle of friends - and is on good terms with a strange assortment of fellow pop stars, including Kanye West, Adele and Pete Townshend. When I run into him at a fundraising auction for the ICA and at a record label party around this same time in London, he is with Yasmine and his manager and doesn't hang around for long.)

Outside school, he continues, he "was desperate to get as much experience as possible", which with his mother's encouragement meant taking jobs singing advertising jingles, trading his fees for studio time to craft his own songs. He was accepted at the London School of Economics to read geography, but dropped out on the first day and enrolled for a brief spell at the Royal College of Music. "I know I'm a s**t pianist - one of the worst I've ever met who does my job - and a mediocre classical singer. I tried to hide it from my peers at college but I knew what I wanted out of it. I have no delusions of grandeur. I know that I write pop songs, and I know that I am meant to be doing what I am doing because I realised it made me tick as a little boy. I've always been incredibly driven."

Such ambition was manifest when he signed with Universal. One executive remembers an early meeting at which Mika cockily explained that he and Yasmine would develop a creative concept for his album's artwork and he mapped out exactly the first phase of his career. Nonetheless, he insists, "I had no concept of who would listen to my music. I didn't know how I was going to be perceived, so I created a world for the music to live in."

Despite its thematic concerns, when Life in Cartoon Motion was released, much of the media attention focused on whether Mika was gay. He acknowledges that the bullying he suffered at school was homophobic and that "I was different. I don't see myself as being particularly camp but maybe in a boys' school I was." Previously, however, he has refused to pin down what makes him tick in this respect, and the only time I ever see him angry is when I mention that an interviewer once wrote: "My hunch is he is either asexual or bisexual, even if he himself isn't yet sure which."

"What does asexual mean? Isn't that a term reserved for a biology class?" he flashes. But given that the new album deals with his teenage years, he realises that the subject won't go away. "Well, it all goes hand in hand, doesn't it? The sexuality thing is really important at that point because you realise it's part of your personality, and it brings on a terrific sense of opportunity, but it also adds to the rollercoaster ... the fragility of those years.

"You know what?" he continues. "With my teenage years there was a lot of 'anything is possible. I can try anything.'"

The song Dr John on the new record kicks off with Mika singing "I look for love in a strange place, in the back of a bar."

"Well," he says, "it wasn't barbershop love, in a let's go to the dance, boys on one side, girls on the other and 'I'll buy you a couple of warm pints of Stella.' I was quite shy but there was a bit of a secret life going on. I made a lot of mistakes. There was a lot of very harsh rejection as well in relationships. Or make-believe relationships that had developed in my head. I wasn't a crazy promiscuous ####-up, but I was doing things I shouldn't have been doing, yes, just like any teenager."

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For what it's worth, my hunch is that Mika's oddness is derived from those earlier formative years, and that of course his mother, whom he tells me now "is a real rock'n'roll mum, she's hard as nails", twigged about his secret life. But perhaps he didn't know that, and I wonder, too, whether the family's religious values had an impact. (He seems the least keen Catholic of them all - whereas his sisters attend the nearby Brompton Oratory.) He sums up the period: "It was: 'Who am I? And what sort of grown-up do I want to be, what kind of person do my parents expect me to be? Who should I sleep with and why should I sleep with those people? Should I be clean? Should I be sober?'

"I never really lost myself, because I was able to say 'even if I'm not what my parents expect me to be and I'm not their ideal, at least I can create a replacement life for myself in the songs that I write.' They're happy songs but they're also a little bit twisted."

It's the first week of June when I see Mika for a final time, this time in sunny Amsterdam, a city not dissimilar to LA in its promise of cheap fantasies. But rather than in the fleshpots, I find him rehearsing for a show in the small hall of the historic Concertgebouw. In fact, in this baroque setting, with the names of composers circling the dome of the hall, he is standing on a grand piano, wearing a pink T-shirt, hammering away on a rubbish bin for a samba-fied version of Lollipop. "The problem with last night," he explains to the other four members of the group, "is that you need an element of performance when you're doing this. We need to look more comical."

Before the release of the album in September, he has decided to put out an EP, The Songs of Sorrow, of four quirky acoustic songs and tour them around six European cities as a sort of palate-cleaning exercise. That said, the EP is lavishly packaged, with the illustrators whose work he was studying in LA providing the artwork for an accompanying book.

One evening, one of them, Tao Nyeu, visited the studio for a meeting. "A woman once asked me to paint a mural in her house," she said, shyly. "So this is the second strangest request I've had." Mika talked about how she might turn her whimsical pictures of teddy bears and bunnies into a narrative illustration for his song Lonely Alcoholic.

The EP and book are only available as a limited edition of a couple of thousand through Mika's website (and Paul Smith's shops - the designer is a fan). "It would have been a huge headache for Universal," he says, "but it does mean I've had to pay all its costs."

The EP tracks represent his more sombre and lyrical side - Toy Boy and Lady Jane, in particular, sounding as he describes them: "They're strange nursery rhymes... odd morality tales.

"When I was writing the first record I made so many allusions to fairy tales and nursery rhymes," he says later that evening, "and the funny thing is that when you're 16 you read them again and realise they're the most violent thing ever. The EP allows me to explore that side. It's a bit Alan Bennett: you know, after Cinderella gets married, her husband has an affair, they get divorced, he keeps custody of the children, she loses all her money and ends up as a maid again."

In London, we had talked about how the best pop music often contains dark meanings and Mika had mentioned a book of Paul McCartney's poetry, in which he discusses writing Blackbird. "When he first wrote it there was a line about 'black woman living at Little Rock', and he meant it as a song about the civil rights movement," he says. "But he realised that might limit his message, and that if you don't conceal the darkness but turn the darkness into a kind of code, that empowers your message; so it became a song for freedom instead of a political song. I found that really interesting, and I try to do that sort of thing as much as possible."

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He had cited, too, "very melancholy pop dance music from the 80s" and in particular a song by Bronski Beat, which I take to be Smalltown Boy. "That was one of the records from my adolescence," he had said wistfully. "When that comes on in a nightclub at five in the morning and you're standing there... it was like, 'I don't know if I'm supposed to cry or smile or both ... but I'll dance all the way through it.'" That feels like the clearest image I have of him in those teenage years.

Some songs that have made it on to the new album get shown off in Amsterdam, too. Closer listening will in time suggest their concealed meaning: Rain, for instance, features lyrics such as "trying to be ordinary, was it me who was the fool? Thought you found the man you wanted until you turned him into something new ... ", and seems to address a specific heartbreak.

That doesn't register now, however. The 600 ticket holders just get hooked by its irresistible melody, and likewise with the pop sheen of Blue Eyes and Good Gone Girl. And while the shows were meant to be stripped back, Mika is in fully flamboyant mode for reworked versions of his old hits, including Grace Kelly and Big Girl (You Are Beautiful). It's a lot of fun. At one point, he explains to the audience - lots of ordinary folk - that his old music teacher from the Royal College would be appalled to see him playing in such a hallowed venue.

Waiting outside afterwards is a gaggle of 100 fans, including two who have dressed up as Lollipop girls, after the song. That sort of dedication is apparently typical of his hardcore followers. On his website, Mika recently started a dialogue with the illustrator Sophie Blackall, who posted a drawing of a girl in an ingeniously designed dress. Last night in Berlin, one fan - a man - turned up dressed exactly as the girl in the drawing. "I don't know if other artists get that sort of attention," he says, "because they laugh when I speak to them about it."

Back in his hotel, we have a final drink (he tends to be a lager drinker). None of his sisters are here, although I did catch a tantalising glimpse of his mum earlier. "The shirt and trousers I was wearing: she made those," he says. I have a final pop at working out his love life, asking whether he's in a relationship right now.

"No," he laughs.

When were you last in a relationship? I ask.

"Recently."

What's the longest relationship you've had?

"Only one... and it lasted a year."

And that's the one that recently finished?

"Well, not recently. Sadly."

It strikes me that as well as being an amalgam of peculiar influences and neuroses and desires, for all his otherwise overwhelming assurance, he can also be quite fragile. But then hasn't the same been true of all the biggest male pop stars - Bowie, for instance, or Freddie Mercury (who Mika namechecked on Grace Kelly, lampooning the comparison) or even Michael Jackson; and isn't it possible that it's in their rank that Mika might find himself one day, whether he wants it or not?

"I make pop music," he told me at one point, "and I fully embrace the fact that I make pop music. I'm totally unashamed about it. And in as much as in certain circles that puts a certain amount of vulgarity on to me, then I totally embrace that vulgarity. Bring it on. There's no shame in what I do as far as I'm concerned. So I want the new record to do well, but you can't write or produce an album with that in mind. It's not, 'Oh, we want to make a hit' - it's nothing like that, because that brings disaster, it's 'I want it to make me feel happy.'

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"I want to turn on the CD and feel 16 again and pretend that I've got a big Farrah Fawcett wig on my head as I dance round to it."

When his new music hits the airwaves, he will be under an even fiercer spotlight; but it feels as if this further fame will only arrive on his terms.

"I started writing music in the first place to experience different emotions and from that point of view absolutely nothing has changed," he tells me finally. "Where I am now... You know, you wake up, you've had a lot of success, what do you do to protect yourself? You make your own little bubble. You do things to make you smile. You live in a weird little world of your own. Because that's all I've ever known."

 

Check out the video:
 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/video/2009/jun/12/mika-observer-music-monthly

Edited August 10, 2015 by Kumazzz
copy & paste the article to the inside [spoiler]

[Guest]

Thanks!!!

[AnnaMariaPetra]

woohee: magic chickens!!

[AnnaMariaPetra]

ahhhgrr: the Concertgebouw!! (I like the way he pronounces it...)

[xlindee]

Good grief!

Im on that vid! With Starrats, Jose and some other Dutchies!

around 3:57, Im the one with the white sunglasses and the blonde hair! AAAH!

Edited June 12, 2009 by xlindee

[vanessa]

Finally a video interview and I spy some Dutchies on the video

[AnnaMariaPetra]

Yummie: a paintcovered Mika:wub2:

I can't wait for the next cd and its cover!

[DANI56]

WOW, Deb!!!! ....grazie infinite!!!!

[Eglė]

Wow! So amazing! Thank you A LOT!

Mika's pop is one one the best pop anyone can find now.

[Lil'Violet]

wow! it's faboulous!!!!

thank you for posting!!!! i think i'm gonna watch it hundreds times!!!!

Edited June 12, 2009 by Lil'Violet

[Emerald]

OMG I so can't wait! The art looks amazing! And I love this painting thing!! Brilliant! I'm sure I'm gonna love the Dr haha

Thanks Deb!!! :D

[JoseOle]

great video!

I was shocked when I saw myself

[Droopsy]

Thanks I loved it

[Emerald]

woohee: magic chickens!!

 

Haha I heard that too:roftl: MFC inspiration haha

[Rubytuesday]

wow that was wicked, aaaw he's such a damn clever little fellow isn't he :-D x

[suzie]

 

[Guest]

I really liked what the reporter said ... when the new album comes out we will all live in Mika's world ... I bet we will

[Lucrezia]

Amazing!!

[robertina]

oh great lord

when you think you're done with mika and his live shows and you're tired to death and want to keep off a while...

a video like this turns up.

 

unfair mika, totally unfair

 

:wub2:

 

*is happy andy was not lying *

[Nadine]

Wonderful vid. loved the Amsterdam footage!

Dr. John & his magic chickens

[Emerald]

Wonderful vid. loved the Amsterdam footage!

Dr. John & his magic chickens

I already love Dr. John:naughty:

[sparkly1]

OOOo0oo000 love it

[mari62]

Thanks Deb!!

[Droopsy]

Wonderful vid. loved the Amsterdam footage!

Dr. John & his magic chickens

 

I already love Dr. John:naughty:

 

Same here!

[leentje1820]

That was totally what I needed today!

God, I love how much he puts his heart in everything that he does!