Reader's Theater Staring...Norman the Goldfish

Not Norman, A Goldfish Story is now Reader's Theater! After garnering a 5-glug review at its debut at Bear Pond Books in Montpelier, VT the Reader's Theater version of Not Norman, A Goldfish Story is ready to take on the road. Next stop: Your Place!

Download the Not Norman Reader's Theater Script.

(If this link fails, click on the "Activities" Tab and scroll down to Not Norman's Activity Box

Ready all you Normans? (Come on you know you always wanted to play a goldfish.) Puff up your fish cheeks, puff out your fish lips and give us a "Glug!"

IF Inspires

Inspiration:  The Civil Rights Movement. Fighting for Right. Rudyard Kipling

The March from Selma to Montgomery protesting unfair voter registration practices in the South was actually 3 Marches:

The first march took place on March 7, 1965. The 600 peaceful marchers were viciously attacked on Edmund Pettus Bridge by state and local police with clubs, gun butts and tear gas. It’s remembered as "Bloody Sunday."

The second march, on March 9th, 1965, was more a show of solidarity, of support, of honor as a restraining order prohibiting the March had been issued. Martin Luther King Jr., along with about 2000 protestors, marched to the bridge,  knelt and prayed.  After prayers they rose and turned the march back to Selma.

The third march is the one most remember.  On March 21, 1965, 3200 protestors stepped forward to begin the 54 mile march to Alabama Capitol building in Montgomery. It took them 5 days to reach the capitol. When they arrived their numbers had swelled to more than 25,000—25,000 people of varying colors, nationalities, social and economic backgrounds and religions stood together outside the capitol—but not on the lawn—as one of the conditions in the petition to march had been a promise to “keep off the grass.”

Less than 5 months later, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which outlawed discriminatory voting practices.

David T. Greenberg, son of National Defense League attorney Jack Greenberg, wrote a novel called A Tugging String (Dutton Children’s Books, 2008) about growing up during the Civil Rights era, specifically the time between the 1st March and the 3rd.  Greenberg calls the book a “constellation” saying “it is not a scholar’s rendition of history; it is fiction,” his efforts to illuminate events and personalities from the 1960s civil rights movement and “bring them to life.” Toward the end of the story, David shares a poem his father had shared with him. “It’s called IF,” his father said. “It’s a very important poem.”

IF

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

But make allowances for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or, being hated, don’t give way to hating,

And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;

If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;

If you can meet with triumph and disaster

And treat those two imposters just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you give your life to broken,

And stoop and build ‘em up with worn-out tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on”,

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

Or walk with kings—nor lose the common touch;

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;

If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With Sixty Seconds’ worth of distance run—

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

By Rudyard Kipling  (from Rewards and Fairies, published in 1909)

Remembering Real

I’ve often imagined my brain as a merry-go-round of colorful carousel horses swirling to the music. Just as the merry-go-round stops to let people off and on, my brain stops, tiny doors pop open and snippets, will-o’-the-wisps, flibbertigibbets of memory, fact, song pop out.

This past weekend my memory merry-go-round wasn’t slowly turning; it was spinning with snippets flying. One wisp of a scientific notion of how none of us is actually solid, that instead we are constantly swapping molecules with every sight, smell, thing, person—everything and then forming and reforming from these molecules, came to mind. You know the way odor molecules break off, float into our noses, hit our receptors and so we smell. I’m thinking the same thing happens with memories.

Why now? It was a reunion weekend. Along with our 2 kids and their sweeties, Curtis and I were in California for a wedding and impromptu family reunion. The wedding was that of my grandparent’s cross-the-street-neighbor’s son, Chris—our son, Max’s, lifetime best “Summers and Christmas Vacations friend.”

The reunion, organized by my first cousin, once removed, Jodi, was an impromptu gathering of family members prompted by our wedding attendance. (Jodi’s mother, Evelyn, and my Grandmother, Nellie, were sisters—for specifics on the once-removed/twice-removed/first cousin/second cuz connections click here!

When you live busy lives far apart, it’s easy to forget the importance of extended family. And the longer you’re apart, the easier it is to make excuses not to spend the money or time to connect. I’ve spent almost 20 years—ever since my grandmother died, and we packed up her belongings and sold her house—making excuses. Aside from my immediate family—mom, the kids, my husband—the last time I’d seen any of my extended family had been at our last family reunion a well-organized weekend affair, 4 years ago. And before that had been 19 years ago, the summer after my grandmother died, when Max, Lexi, Grandma Mary and I took Curtis to meet the family…

Those cousins’ once-removed know the “back when" us. Back when we were tiny, naughty, silly, sweet, and more than once “cried til we were blue in the face.” The relatives who actually knew the “rotten, just plain rotten” cousin, Corky, mom named our dog after.  That those “Summers and Christmas Vacation friends” are the ones son Max buried and unburied the rotten mole with, and know the Lexi who always wore hair bows and refused to wear pants. Those second cousins are the ones we snuck cookies and shot bb guns with, who remember how our aunties and grandmothers “laughed til they peed their pants,” how Uncle Jimmy drove mom to the hospital the day I was born—that knew the glamorous teen mom was, the “cool cousin” who gave them lipstick samples and taught them to kiss the mirror. Cousins who also still have the taste of Great Grandma’s sugary milky “starter coffee,” and splinter scars from her back fence and flat patches on our knees from hours of kneeling at church as well as at the window in the back room from hours spent peeping through a crack in the blinds to spy on the neighbor kids and their “wild friends”…

Those years of swapped molecules and shared memories are the stuff of families. Family who remind us who we were, where we came from, and why we look, act, laugh the way we do now—families who pretend not to notice, and definitely don’t care, that we’re looking worse for wear (or maybe love us better because we are?)

Family make us real; family keeps us real—the real as defined by Margery Winifred Williams' Skin Horse in the Velveteen Rabbit (originally published in 1922):

“Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."-excerpt from The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Winifred Williams, originally published in 1922.

(Thank you Erin Stead for referencing The Velveteen Rabbit in your Caldecott Award Acceptance Speech. Read more:

Year Of Inspirational Thinking

It's a new dawn/Its a new day/It's a new life...

That line from the "Feeling Good Song" as sung by Michael Buble- his name makes me laugh-is playing in my head. Adding to that: It's a new blog year for me! I'm going to take this opportunity to change my blog. Not to say I won't post anymore Jakarta stories or book news, but that's no longer my primary focus. My intention is to declare a YEAR OF INSPIRATIONAL THINKING!

Each week I will post quotes, stories, poems, words that inspire thoughts, ideas, emotion, interaction and maybe change.  (Warning: I am not going to spare the exclamation points)

The Year of Inspiration Thinking begins now with this quote from Antonia Fraser,  author of Must You Go? My Life with Harold Pinter, among others:

"I love hearing details of writers' craft, as cannibals eat the brains of clever men to get cleverer."