It’s when all the children of Fresno gather on our grounds for our traditional Easter tour date hunt, where they’ll spend the day looking for performance dates scheduled for this day, such as Maceo Parker in Chicago or Billy Cobham’s Spectrum in Oakland, California. And we really expected this Easter to be the best ever, with celebrities like Alicia Keys and Jackson Browne helping out with the holiday festivities.

Yes, this Easter was supposed to be a great day. That is, until he came to visit.

He stood over six feet tall, and from his bushy little shrub of a tail to his gigantic ears waving in the Fresno breeze we knew he was nothing but trouble. He headed straight for the bar for a couple of vodka shooters, and then leered at the Wilson sisters of Heart, apologizing for his disheveled looks by saying, “Please don’t mind me, I’m having a bad hare day.”

It was all downhill from there.

“Has anyone seen my cousin?” he said as he browsed the dates for Loverboy and sipped champagne from our private reserves. “He’s in the energy business, but this Enron thing has kept him pretty busy. He’s just been going and going and going.”

“And then there’s Uncle Bugs, the movie star,” he said as he slammed back a 40 ouncer of St. Ides and checked out the schedules for Toto and The Breeders. “But he got downsized in last year’s AOL / Time Warner merger. You know, hare today, gone tomorrow?”

Well, as you can guess, there’s nothing worse than a boozing six-foot rabbit hell bent for word play. He emptied our bar and pelted our guests, like Andre Rieu and Elvis Costello, with bad jokes and equally bad breath. Yes, he was the guest that wouldn’t leave, and we thought our Easter was ruined. That is, until he met his match in the form of a towering Canadian songstress.

He ambled over to Alanis Morissette as she was captivating the children with tales of existential ironies. He staggered a bit, took a long pull from his bottle of Night Train, and asked her, “Do you believe in the hare-after?”

It was so quiet your could hear a pin drop. The giant rabbit and the Grammy winner. Finally Alanis nodded a very tentative “yes.”

“Then you know what I’m hare after,” said the giant rabbit as he tried to put his fuzzy arm around the singer.

Well, maybe it was all the bad jokes, or maybe it was the stench of his boozy rabbit breath that got her fiery Canadian ire up. For it was at that moment that Alanis grabbed him by the ears and then proceeded to spin his head around until he looked like one gigantic, twisted rubber band.

Then, with a mysterious smirk that was so “Alanis,” she let go, and the rabbit’s ears started spinning like helicopter blades. The six-foot tall rabbit rose up into the sky and flew off over the horizon. Needless to say, we haven’t seen hide nor hare of him since.

Yes, this Easter is one for the record books. We’ll always remember the six foot rabbit. We’ll remember how he tormented our guests with his insipid twisting of words, drank all of our booze, and how it took a talented singer/songwriter from Ottawa to save the day.

But most of all, we’ll always remember the visit from the Easter Punny.