L’l Red Riding Hood

by Donna Swagerty Shreve

Sam the Sham & and the Pharaohs 1966

The year was 1989 and Vinnie and I took our annual trip to Camp Tuolumne with our children and nieces and nephews in tow. This year Cres joined us for a few days and was a great addition to our annual challenge of creating a skit for the talent night. We 

had a range of high schoolers down to preschoolers and they all needed to be involved and comfortable with their part. Such a challenge!

Let me set the scene: The camp fire was going on  the ground in front of stage with arena seating of logs. Cres, with his guitar, is sitting to the right of the stage with Katie, Jay and Wendy at his feet in their pajamas. He begins the song as a bed time story. The stage curtains opens with three background singers toward the back of the stage. Dana, Carson and Brad, all wearing sun glasses, are snapping their fingers in rhythm to Cres’s singing “L’l Red Riding Hood.” At various points there was a pause in the song while the trio howled like wolves. On stage is Jennifer in a red hoodie as L’l Red Riding Hood with her basket, and Aaron as a wolf with a badminton birdie painted brown on his nose and pine needles attached to simulate whiskers. He is wearing a brown towel attached around his neck as a cape. As the song progressed, with Cres’s beautiful baritone/bass voice, the two of them acted out the predator/prey dance. The end of the song had Jennifer reaching into her basket and scooping up a hand full of whipping cream that came from the camp’s kitchen, and pushing it into Aaron’s face. The brown towel came in handy for Aaron.

It was our best skit ever and the audience loved it. The next year when we arrived to another week at camp, one of the staff asked Vinnie if we had something ready for our skit for talent night. We had made an impression.

Trivia background:1966 Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs sang L’l Red Riding Hood and it hit number 2 on top ten. It went gold. Their more famous song was Wooly Bully.

The Bobs were a local bay area group that Vinnie introduced to our family in the 1980s. We even went to Berkeley to see their concert. We had several of their CDs and, of course, one of their cover songs was “L’l Red Riding Hood.” We had listened to that CD in the car on the way to camp. Cres, of course, knew the song and could play and sing it. We were convinced he could play any song.

I asked several of the participants in that famous skit and was amazed at how much they remembered with affection of that special time at camp and how Cres had made such a great impression.

490 words

4/27/2025

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