Each summer, when I was 7 or 8 years old, Miss Heyworth, an elderly neighbor of ours, paid me to hunt down and exterminate slugs in her prized garden. For the royal sum of five pence per capita (roughly eight cents in U.S. currency), I would dispatch the slimy creatures with a deft sprinkling from the saltshaker borrowed from our kitchen table.

I have regularly written of the raccoons, mosquitos, mice, frogs, actors and other wild creatures that frequent the American Folklore Theatre stage and backstage areas, but I recently experienced another open-air theater - this one in St. Louis - whose local animal population would make the familiar AFT fauna tremble.

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