The Mike and Mary Situation heads to Big Top Chautauqua’s The Backstage concert venue for an intimate, relaxed evening of songs, stories, and good-natured onstage exchanges grown out of making music for years and years and miles and miles.

Put a Wisconsin farm boy and volunteer firefighter turned bestselling author and songwriter onstage beside an East Coast Yale grad who earned her chops in FedEx trucks and Texas honky-tonks and you’ve got the Mike and Mary Situation. As a duo, Perry and Cutrufello are as at ease with the audience as they are with each other. The songs hit directly and cleanly, the harmonies contrast like worn leather and rough-cut lumber, and the stage banter plays like a conversation between two longtime road-wise friends who’ve taken their lumps and their chances, whose trade is words and music but know what it is to work a loading dock or a pitchfork, and who figure if life ain’t played out exactly as you drew it up, you might as well laugh about it, sing about it, and get on with it.