With apologies to Gillian Flynn. And Jim Henson.
Cool Pig. Frogs always say that’s what they want. Cool Pig is cold. Cold-blooded, that is. A feat managed by sheer willpower overriding her mammalian biology and also regular ice baths. Cool Pig never gets embarrassed by the way her Frog dances, flailing his arms in the air as if he’s experiencing a grand mal seizure. She simply smiles and karate chops the bejeezus out of the evil fast-food chain owner chasing him down for his delectable frog legs.
The essence of the Cool Pig is that she likes what her Frog likes. If her Frog is into hip-hop, she pops and locks with the best of them. If her Frog has a dissection kink, she brings a scalpel to the playroom. It doesn’t even matter if her mate isn’t a Frog. If she’s into bears, Cool Pig will suffer night after night at the comedy club, laughing her head off at jokes that are objectively unfunny. For her Dog, the Cool Pig will listen to him murder one Billy Joel cover after another, even though his piano hasn’t been tuned since Billy Joel was on wife number two. Cool Pig supports her man, no matter the species.
I knew what Kermit was into the moment I met him: banjo music. Mainly because he carried the banjo everywhere he went and would stop to play it at seemingly random points throughout our journey together. For him, I was happy to be that version of Cool Pig. Stopping for a song break even though someone was always trying to kill/eat us? Cool Pig supports her Frog’s rock star delusions. Freshly caught mosquitoes marinated in his mucus for every meal? I gobbled them down and still maintained my curvaceous chops. Pretend to like his friends even though they are a motley crew of losers, some of whom possess delusions of grandeur.
Hell, I moved to the swamp for him, and now my dry cleaner has stopped even trying to get the mud stains out of my vintage Chanel suits. I don’t say a word about his “nephew” Robin ignoring the fact that Kermit obviously fathered that twerpy little tadpole.
With my sophistication and years of martial arts training, including krav maga, I helped him transform from a humble musician to a movie star, an investigative reporter, a sea captain, a spy, and even a character in a Dickens novel (that one required some manipulation of the time-space continuum, but for him, I was willing to side kick Einstein’s theory of relativity to tiny pieces). Together we were the ultimate power couple. Ride or die for life. I was by his side through every caper, every family Christmas. I did it all, and I did it looking fabulous. Every year I told myself, “This is it. This is the year he proposes and we settle down somewhere and start making babies that defy the laws of man and nature.”
Instead, what did he do? He made the unilateral decision to take his half-baked side hustle of a musical—if you can call it that considering it’s one song and zero plot—and take it to the Broadway stage. Being a Cool Pig, I had no choice but to follow him to Manhattan even if it meant sleeping in storage containers at the airport because somehow, between him and his twenty friends (one of whom was even supposedly a doctor), none of them could scrape up enough money for a single hotel room. And when all of this failed, and his friends abandoned him, he put me on a train headed for New Jersey.
NEW FRICKING JERSEY.
Sure, he was all tearful goodbyes and awful banjo music at the station, but the second I returned to the city, I saw him canoodling with that floozy waitress from the diner where he works. That mealy-mouthed twit who probably doesn’t even have a single celebrity friend. I mean, they have rats working in the kitchen! You just know she’s dating the health inspector to keep a place like that going.
Right then and there, I decided I was done being his Cool Pig. Well, first, I dropped my binoculars and went literal ham bananas on a fire escape, but after that, I calmly decided he didn’t get to have his mosquito cake and eat it too.
Oh, I was going to make his dreams come true. Through an elaborate and seemingly coincidental chain of events, his “show” would get to Broadway. But there would be a surprise waiting for him before the final curtain. He might have thought Gonzo was going to play the minister; however, since I had tied Gonzo to a chair and bribed Camilla the Chicken into scratching his eyes out if he screamed, an understudy had to be arranged. An understudy who just happened to be an actual priest.
What can I say?
Miss Piggy the Cool Pig is gone.
Call me Mrs. Piggy.