Don’t you love “secret benefactor” stories? You remember, of course, that in Great Expectations Pip was convinced Miss Havisham was his secret benefactor. (Spoiler alert! she wasn’t.)
A similar theme is found in Frances Hodgson Burnett‘s A Little Princess, about a much-abused but uncomplaining orphan who one day trudges the weary steps to her bare-bones garret and discovers a magical world of comfort has been created for her.
In 1912, the American writer Jean Webster wrote an epistolary novel in the same vein, Daddy LongLegs. It’s about a poor girl in an orphanage whose little essays capture the attention of a man on the orphanage board. He doesn’t like girls and wants nothing to do with her other than to send her to college anonymously and see if she can be a success. He keeps tabs by reading letters he has required her to write every month.
Well, you can imagine …
The book was hugely popular in its day and has been made into all manner of anime and films, including one with Shirley Temple and one with Fred Astaire ( both of which have snippets on YouTube and seem to be in pure gag-me-with-a-spoon territory).
Last night we saw a musical version of Daddy LongLegs at the Merrimack Rep and liked it very much. Some might find it too epistolary for the stage or too sweet for 2012, but it wasn’t Shirley Temple and the audience was crazy for it.
John Caird, famous in part for the Royal Shakespeare Theater’s Nicholas Nickleby, wrote the book and directed. Paul Gordon wrote the music and lyrics. Megan McGinnis was the orphan, and Rob Hancock was the benefactor she assumed to be 83 and bald. (Spoiler alert! he isn’t.)
What was surprising was the strong feminist and socialist vibe, which the program notes explain were characteristic of the author. “Webster was actively involved in remedying the plight of the impoverished, not only from a financial standpoint, but from a cultural standpoint as well.” She believed that no matter what the poor had missed out on in their early years (we discussed that here), many could succeed if just given a chance.
According to Edward Rothstein in the NY Times, “Passengers on ‘The Ride’ — a tour bus with floor-to-ceiling windows and nightclub-style audio — tool through Manhattan, encountering such (pre-arranged) sights as a businessman breaking into tap dance, a juggler tossing hot dogs, and a ballerina in a glowing tutu dancing around Columbus Circle.” Read more.
I’d love to look out a bus window and see a businessman breaking into a tap dance. Years ago, I knew a tap dance teacher who wanted to organize groups of “shoppers” who could suddenly break into choreographed tap routines up and down supermarket aisles. Am still looking for them.
I do have to wonder what NYC tourists expect to see when they look out bus windows. An artsy guy, my brother’s classmate, was walking down the street in Greenwich Village minding his own business one day in the sixties when someone leaned out of a bus and called, “There’s one of them now!” One of what? he wondered.
Whatever you’re looking for in New York, you can probably find it. All you have to do is believe.
A while back I watched the movie The Little Red Truck, a documentary by producer Pam Voth and director Rob Whitehair highlighting the work of the Missoula Children’s Theatre. It was a moving experience.
The Missoula (Montana) Children’s Theatre travels by truck from city to city all over America to put on productions with children in low-income urban and rural areas. The transformation of some of these children in the week it takes to produce a full-scale, one-hour musical is something to see, with many insecure children discovering talents that no one, including the children themselves, knew they had.
For kids who have never seen a play and have no place to rehearse — nor any props or costumes or sets other than what the theater company can pack into the truck — putting on a production seems unimaginable.
As the movie unfolds, you see how doing the unimaginable builds self-confidence, and generates both laughter and ideas about possible futures. It’s not about growing up to be actors. It’s about seeing that there are options, and starting to think differently.
And in case anyone is more interested in the academic skills boosted through theater, this Education Week article makes that case. Not a bad case to be made, but it’s the magic of Queen Mab that speaks to me.
Like many Swedes, Erik is fluent in several languages and understands others. It’s a riot to hear him “conversing” with Svein. Svein says something in Norwegian. Erik answers in Swedish.
Language skill has come in handy for both Erik and Suzanne recently, as they are able to converse with the Honduran worker who is painting their new residence. Not only will the paint job be better, but Erik thinks he may have found a new group with whom to play pick-up soccer.
Beyond such practical matters, speaking other languages can improve brain capability and even keep Alzheimer’s patients functioning longer, as Jessica Marshall writes at Discovery News. The longer you speak two languages, the better.
“Being able to use two languages and never knowing which one you’re going to use right now rewires your brain. The attentional executive system which is crucial for all higher thought — it’s the most important cognitive piece in how we think — that system seems to be enhanced.” Read more.
A reason that poor children are sometimes unprepared for school is that the words they are starting to read in books may not convey meaning to them. What does it mean to park a car if you have never ridden in a car?
The NY Times has a lovely article about one NYC school’s unusual field trips, designed to fill some gaps in knowledge that textbook writers take for granted.
Michael Winerip writes, “Experiences that are routine in middle-class homes are not for P.S. 142 children. When Dao Krings, a second-grade teacher, asked her students recently how many had never been inside a car, several, including Tyler Rodriguez, raised their hands. ‘I’ve been inside a bus,’ Tyler said. ‘Does that count?’
“When a new shipment of books arrives, Rhonda Levy, the principal, frets. Reading with comprehension assumes a shared prior knowledge, and cars are not the only gap at P.S. 142. Many of the children have never been to a zoo or to New Jersey. Some think the emergency room of New York Downtown Hospital is the doctor’s office. …
“Working with Renée Dinnerstein, an early childhood specialist, [Ms. Levy] has made real life experiences the center of academic lessons, in hopes of improving reading and math skills by broadening children’s frames of reference.
“The goal is to make learning more fun for younger children. … While many schools have removed stations for play from kindergarten, Ms. Levy has added them in first and second grades. [And] several times a month they take what are known as field trips to the sidewalk. In early February the second graders went around the block to study Muni-Meters and parking signs. They learned new vocabulary words, like ‘parking,’ ‘violations’ and ‘bureau.’ JenLee Zhong calculated that if Ms. Krings put 50 cents in the Muni-Meter and could park for 10 minutes, for 40 minutes she would have to put in $2. They discovered that a sign that says ‘No Standing Any Time’ is not intended for kids like them on the sidewalk.” Read more.
One thinks of all the small daily interactions one has with one’s own children and the learning occurring without forethought. There are interactions and learning in poor families, too, but if the words and concepts are not what they kids will encounter in school, I think these excursions can be very helpful.
The last time we checked in at the Greenway, Occupy Boston had just departed, and new sod was being laid down where there had been tents.
Today I walked in both directions along the Greenway and took pictures of the new art. In front of the Boston Harbor Hotel is a temporary exhibit called Ice Chimes. It is designed to enhance the music of icicles. In the other direction, near the gateway to Chinatown is a sculpture with what looks like the sail of a junk and another sculpture of white sticks.
I was reading an article in the Sunday Globe about a musician who self-published a comedic memoir on his years as a freelance bassist with the Boston Pops. The book was called Real Men Don’t Rehearse; the article was mainly about self-publishing.
As I read the article, I kept thinking the guy’s name was familiar. I racked my brain: who wrote and the funny plays for Adventures in Music in the 1980s, the stage series introducing kids to classical music?
John had performed in two of those productions, sometimes called the Splatgort Series after the adult character. But John was 11 or 12 and now he’s a grown-up with a toddler and a wife. I looked at the photo of the author in the paper. Less hair. Not sure.
But, soft! (as they say in Shakespeare). Google meets all needs (as they don’t say in Shakespeare). Here is the site for Justin Locke Productions, and it’s definitely the same guy.
If you are mainly interested in the self-publishing aspect of this tale, read the Globe article by Megan McKee. That’s quite engaging, too. I especially like this line, “Locke believes that real success can often be found through unconventional routes.”
Like most Americans, I don’t know much about the multibillion-dollar Farm Bill, which is up for renewal this year. NYU professor Marion Nestle talks about its enormous complexity in the Boston Globe.
“I’d like to bring agricultural policy in line with health policy. Health policy tells us that we ought to be making fruits and vegetables inexpensive.” Her biggest concern is that those who produce and sell processed foods benefit most from current policy, which has had the effect of lowering prices for processed food and increasing the prices for the fresh fruits and vegetables people really need.
I have blogged before about the related problem of “food deserts,” localities where there is no reasonably priced market and people end up eating too much junk food. (Check out this post and this one.)
“Increasingly, metropolitan areas are creating or bolstering their food policies, recognizing the need to ensure that healthful and affordable foodstuffs are available for residents. Baltimore fashioned a food policy initiative in 2009 which involves multiple city departments and an advisory group of over 30 organizations. Priorities included the reduction of ‘food deserts’ and the support of projects that allow low-income residents to order groceries online and pick them up at the local library. New York and San Francisco have also created their own food policy initiatives, and mayors across the U.S. have met to launch a food policy task force.”
“In the summer, Shirley and Ewald August grow blueberries at their Windsor Mill, Md., farm and sell at Baltimore farmers markets.” Photograph: Amy Davis/MCT/Landov
The hobby shop Dabblers has a lot going on all the time — many kinds of craft classes, birthday parties, a mini restaurant with great coffee, and now something that sounds like a throwback to an earlier age. It’s an etiquette workshop for children ages 8 to 11!
I’m very curious to know how many kids (or their parents) sign up. The workshop in March is to be led by “a noted Etiquette Expert in the Boston area and will cover: introductions, dining skills, how to be a considerate friend, family member and classmate.”
(How does one get to be a noted Etiquette Expert, capitalized?)
I remember when John, and later Suzanne, went to ballroom class in middle school. The kids learned some etiquette there, but I don’t know how many details stuck. I listened in and learned you are supposed to say, “Mrs. Streitweiser, may I present Dr. Turnipseed?” but I have never been good at practicing it. I did think such classes were extinct. Good luck, Dabblers!
Last summer I blogged about the chewing-gum artist in England, Ben Wilson. Today I see that another WordPress blogger has taken some pictures of the art, and they are pretty great.
Check out what Little London Observationist posted here.
I was hoping to see this documentary before writing about it, but can’t get it from Netflix.
Have you heard of The Interrupters? It’s about street workers in Chicago, former gang members, who try to stop violence by, if necessary, literally “interrupting” a fight. They are trying to atone to some extent for their own past and are working to keep other young people from making the same mistakes.
As Saul Austerlitz writes in the Boston Globe, one can “see the possibility of redemption, even in those seemingly beyond it, and to bear witness to the hesitant first steps taken by young men and women toward a better future. …
“If anything truly surprised [the filmmakers], it was how much they enjoyed making this film, somber subject matter to the contrary. ‘We got to hang out with people who are amazing, inspiring, funny, fun to be around,’ says James, ‘and who have made this incredible journey in their lives, and we got to bear witness to people beginning their own journey in that way.’
“Cajoling, hectoring, relentlessly interrogative, interrupters like Ameena are moral arbiters by virtue of their own experiences. ‘They have moral authority without moralizing,’ says James. Understanding their struggles to come to grips with their own pasts, we also understand their motivation.” Read more here.
Today I went with two other volunteers from work to read with fifth graders in an urban school. Volunteers alternate weeks during the school year, some reading to first graders, some teaching math to fourth graders, and a few of us helping selected fifth graders read and discuss chapter books.
At the end of today’s reading-enrichment session, the librarian told one of my colleagues that a girl who was new to the school and afraid she couldn’t keep up in the program had initially asked to be excused. Having been encouraged to stick with it, she is now happy she did and is very enthusiastic about reading.
I was reminded of a wonderful post at Asakiyume’s blog, about a judge who owed his success in large part to a school librarian who turned him onto to reading — by stealth. She noticed that the boy, a nonreader, slipped out with book by a black author. So she drove to a town where she could get more and placed them where the boy would be sure to find them.
Central Falls, Rhode Island, may be best known today for going bankrupt and forcing its police and fire unions to accept cuts to pension benefits, but it has more going for it than angst.
It has people who care, like Mike Ritz and chocolatier Andrew Shotts, who are selling Chocolateville chocolate bars to help children at risk.
It also has a charter school that has quietly improved children’s reading skills, spreading its success to public schools in the city.
Joe Nocera writes in the NY Times that before starting The Learning Community in Central Falls, Meg O’Leary and Sarah Friedman “spent three years working with the Providence school system on a pilot program designed to come up with ways to ‘transform teaching practices and improve outcomes.’ ”
In 2007, when Frances Gallo became the Central Falls Schools superintendent, she began to investigate why families were so excited about getting into The Learning Community.
“The school drew from the same population as the public schools. It had the same relatively large class sizes. It did not screen out students with learning disabilities. Yet the percentage of students who read at or above their grade level was significantly higher than the public school students. When Gallo asked O’Leary and Friedman if they would apply their methods to the public schools, they jumped at it.
“ ‘At first it was, “Oh, here comes another initiative,” ‘ recalls Friedman. There were plenty of venting sessions at the beginning, along with both resentment and resistance. But The Learning Community invited the teachers to visit its classrooms, where the public school teachers saw the same thing Gallo had seen. And very quickly they also began to see results.”
I heard the singer Harry Belafonte give a speech today. Boy, is he ever “in the fray” at 85!
He covered his life story: the journey from New York to his mother’s Jamaican relatives to be raised by a poor but big-hearted village; service in WW II; involvement in black theater in Harlem; acting training at the New School with classmates such as Marlon Brando; and social justice activism with people like Eleanor Roosevelt, JFK, Martin Luther King Jr., and Nelson Mandela.
His “monologue” was loaded with intriguing and amusing anecdotes, and his face lit up in that wonderful youthful smile that many will recall.
I was interested to see where the talk would wind up, because it was clear that helping the poor and combating injustice still make him tick. He moved on from his own story to honoring the youthfulness and nonviolence of the Occupy movement and then zeroed in on his current concern, our prison system.
He asked why the country has more people in prison than any other country and why we spend more to build prisons than schools. He acknowledged that states like California and New York are beginning to find better ways to deal with underlying social ills. Belafonte himself volunteers at SingSing to help inmates get a college education.
Bruce Springsteen, he said, once asked him how to deal with some of the issues the country faces, and Belafonte answered that when someone knocks on his door, he opens it. He thinks it is important to hear whatever the knocker has to say.
I can attest to that. As a young teen I myself knocked on his door, and he opened it. I wish I could say I was knocking about social justice, but it was something mundane. That summer people were circulating petitions to keep a road from being built on Fire Island, which we loved partly because there were no roads. Harry Belafonte signed the petition.
When my cousin Claire is not in Arizona, she is in Nova Scotia. Recently, she got involved in efforts to save the worn-out seawall that the little town of Gabarus depends on. No one seems to know who has the responsibility to mend it.
“A group says their tiny community in eastern Nova Scotia and its livelihood are being placed at risk because a 70-year-old seawall that wards off the Atlantic Ocean is on the verge of collapse,” writes the Huffington Post.
“Local resident Tim Menk said finding the money to repair the structure that protects the 300-year-old village of Gabarus in Cape Breton has become a four-year battle that’s mired in the murky details of who owns the seawall.
“At stake for Gabarus is its fishing industry, road access to the village and several private homes, said Menk, an organizer with Friends of Gabarus.
” ‘We believe … it could be, as we say, one wave away from failure.’ ” Read more.
It’s the sort of thing that worries everyone who lives or works near the sea. When I was a child, storms that ripped neighbors’ Fire Island houses out to sea made a big impression on me. You learn respect for waves.
Suzanne's Mom's Blog 