"Hello," Jacob said. "Dare I ask what are you four doing wandering around in the forest?"

"We are going to Tulsa to play in a honky-tonk bar," the donkey said. "Our owners had no use for us anymore, so we decided to use our musical talents to make it big, just like Garth Brooks and Toby Keith did."

"That sounds logical," Wilhelm said. "So where are your instruments?"

"We don’t need them," the hound said. "We have our voices. Would you like to hear us sing?"

"Uh, maybe another time," Jacob said.

"Well, that’s okay, because right now we’ve been looking for a place to stay the night," the cat said. "Do you two have any ideas as to where we could go?"

"No," Jacob said. "We’ve been searching for a place ourselves."

The group of six searched until they saw a faint fire light in the distance.

"What do you suppose that is?" Wilhelm said.

"Oh, it’s probably a meth lab," the donkey said. "Unfortunately, Oklahoma has a lot of them. Why don’t we go try to scare the people so maybe they won’t make the drugs and sell them to kids? Hopefully, they’ve been manufacturing outside so that the house won’t be too dangerous for us to sleep in after we run them off."

The animals and the Grimms snuck up to the house. Sure enough, they saw the criminals inside the house, planning what to do with the money they made from selling the meth.

"What shall we do?" Wilhelm said.

"I’ve got an idea," the donkey said. "Everybody ready? One, two, three. . .sing!"

With that, the animals unleashed such a noise that the men all jumped and ran, thinking that they were hearing police sirens.

Then all the animals and the Grimms went inside the house to go to sleep. At around midnight, they heard a noise. One of the men had tried to return. He came up to the cat, but the cat hissed and spit and terrified the man. He ran back to the rest of his friends, telling them that there was some crazy spirit inside the house. They all assumed that it must be the drugs talking, but none of them wanted to go back to the house to find out, so they left the area.

Now the house belonged to the musicians to do as they please, so they moved in and built themselves a nice little outdoor stage where they could sing to their hearts’ content. They tried contacting Garth Brooks to come jam with them, but had no luck. Instead, they lived out the rest of their days happily creating music. From time to time, Jacob and Wilhelm would come back to visit, but Wilhelm just hated the noise, so they didn’t make it back very often. Jacob did learn to play a little bit of harmonica, though, and from time to time he would come back and play with the musicians when Wilhelm was busy.

Author’s note: This week I retold "The Bremen Town Musicians." I changed the town name to Tulsa, because I thought it made for a good title. I changed the robbers in the original story to drug manufacturers, because, sadly, we have a lot of those in Oklahoma.

For this week's picture, I tried to draw all four of the musicians, but the donkey looked like a cat, so I just decided to draw the cat and the hound.

Bibliography

"The Bremen Town Musicians"
Website: Tales Collected by the Brothers Grimm
Weblink: http://www.ucs.mun.ca/~wbarker/fairies/grimm/027.html.
From Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Household Tales, trans. Margaret Hunt (London: George Bell, 1884), 1:221-224.