Is Mary Poppins a Super Hero?
Well I seem to be coming up with more reasons why she’s a super hero than why she isn’t. Please enter the debate.
But before you do, I have another assignment. Jonathan Goldstein on This American Life, show number 241, has Mary Poppins and the Penguin meet at a dinner party. Listening won’t help you make your verdict, but it’s just too fun to pass up. Just be patient for the story to come on.
Childcraft: Music for the Family
I hope your family was musical. Mine was not. I grew up with only a few LPs in the house: Glen Miller, Mitch Miller, Johnny Cash, and a Reader’s Digest collection of light classical music. The radio wasn’t on very often and mostly it reported farm prices and local news. I did fall in love with Louis Armstrong as a child, though, so I must have heard him on the radio when Mom was too busy to turn it off. Mom didn’t like his voice; I thought he was the greatest singer and musician I’d ever heard. (I admit that’s not saying much.)
I was never given the drum set I wanted as a child (or the race car set, but I did have a pony.) I was given an accordion. Who gives a toy accordion? I think this speaks to the level of musical sophistication in my family. At a later holiday I received much better musical toys: a tambourine and a guitar. This meant that when the neighbor kids came over and we played “The Monkeys” I could be any of them except Micky Dolenz (and no one wanted to be Micky Dolenz.) I made a great Davy Jones, I’m sure.
This Childcraft volume of children’s music was probably more often used by parents and scout leaders than by children. My mother never learned any of the lullabies from the book, but I do recognize a few songs from Brownies such as “Oh, Dear! What Can the Matter Be?” and “Billy Boy.”
My suspicions that the encyclopedia publisher was aiming for the Canadian market was confirmed by seeing “O Canada!” under the heading of “Patriotic Songs.” The Christian bias remains with an entire chapter of hymns but “The Hanukkah Song” made it into the “Songs of the Seasons and Festivals” chapter. This was diversity for the 1940s.
It’s too bad that I didn’t remember this volume when I was learning to play clarinet and was looking for sheet music. All I ever had was a hymnal to play from. But my situation was nothing compared what what I read about Johann Sebastian Bach. He had to steal sheet music from behind iron bars and copy it by moonlight so he’d have his own music to play. And no one made me play my clarinet in the attic where poor George Frederick Handel had to play his clavier.
I did practice my clarinet willingly, unlike my sister who had given it up after playing for only a year or so. I even picked up a recorder to mess around with and tapped the keys of a Hammond Organ on occasion. I jumped at the chance to play the bassoon in band and loved the sounds that I could strangle out of that strange instrument. But I was never any good. When I was in high school my band teacher used to slap my thighs to try to keep me on beat. And I was never ever in tune. I loved to play but knew I lacked talent.
It wasn’t until Dad gave me a mountain dulcimer he had made that I learned what people meant when they talked about something being out of tune. I could never tune it, but I rested my hand on the base while a friend tuned it for me and suddenly I understood the concept. I could feel the vibrations changing as she tightened or loosened the strings. I still can’t hear any difference so mostly it sits in the living room as a decoration. Luckily the game “Rock Band” doesn’t require any tuning so I can once again play the toy guitar. I think that’s as musical as I’m ever going to get.
MORE on the Childcraft collection:
Poems of Early Childhood
Storytelling and Other Poems
Folk and Fairy Tales
Animal Friends and Adventures
Life in Many Lands
Great Men and Famous Deeds
Exploring the World Around Us
Childcraft: Art for Children
Childcraft: Art for Children
Masterpiece, the art auction game, is where I got my art education as a child. Any piece could be a forgery! So if an artwork wasn’t in the Art Institute of Chicago, the source of the images used in the game, I didn’t know about it.
It’s too bad I never noticed that I had this volume of reproductions of other pieces created by my favorite artists in the game: Mary Cassattt, Winslow Homer, El Greco. While the quality of color printing in this book doesn’t display any vibrancy, I think I would have enjoyed them anyway. I wasn’t particularly discerning as a child (or even now.)
When I was young, my much older brother was attending college studying art. The family made fun of him for this. It was not seen as any kind of legitimate study even though he was very talented and sold some of his work. A book like this one, encouraging kids to try all sorts of creative media, would have been a good alternative viewpoint for me.
I love it that the editors have included artwork by children in each section of the book. They are given the same amount of space and the same type of commentary as the artwork of the great masters. I can only imagine what it must have been like for the kid from Delaware with his or her collage of hay, coconut, and cotton featured on page 74. To open a real encyclopedia and see a piece of art you may have done for a school assignment there in print for the world to see must have been a rather heady experience. I think I’d be upset that my name wasn’t included since I’ve always been rather fond of my name. But I know I’d be thinking about how my artistic vision compared to Arthur Dove’s “Goin’ Fishin’” collage. I’d be busy that year making more collages and feeling pretty proud of myself.
Honestly, I should go through this entire book page by page and pay close attention. I haven’t heard of many of the artists included. I’m still limited in knowledge to what’s in my local museums. And I could use the reminder to look out my window and see shapes, colors, reflections, and light. The skill of observation is dulled, I think, as we age unless we actively engage it.
MORE on the Childcraft collection:
Poems of Early Childhood
Storytelling and Other Poems
Folk and Fairy Tales
Animal Friends and Adventures
Life in Many Lands
Great Men and Famous Deeds
Exploring the World Around Us
A wee little shrew poem
In Borneo there is a shrew.
(A magazine says this story’s true.)
of how he is a shrewd collector
of the pitcher plant’s sweetest nectar.
(Nothing yet unusual to see,
but what about when he’s got to pee?)
Now nature calls the large and small.
Some seek a hole and some a stall.
The shrew just pauses in his meal
to take a break and do his deal.
He makes his poo deposit
in a fauna water closet.
The greenish climbing pitcher
is with nutrients all the richer.
The Nepenthes lowii
’tis not a flower showy.
It’ll never make the table’s vase
but for everything there is a place.
Just remember…
If you need to use its facilities
you’re asked to fertilize the stamen please.
Cancer’s not a fad
Enough with the pink already. I’m glad to know that everyone is concerned about my boobs, but really, they get plenty of attention already. They are very nice, still fairly perky, and collect a lot of dropped food. They don’t need you to wear pink shoes on the football field to show your support.
Pink was already a problematic color before cancer claimed it. It was Barbie’s color. That was enough association with breasts. And it was the color of Pepto-Bismol. So it was sort of the big boob, feminine, upset stomach color.
I’m ready for all this cancer pink mania to stop. It’s becoming counterproductive. I’m more than a year behind in getting my mammogram and seeing a breast cancer buffalo doesn’t really encourage me to make that appointment. In fact I’m now afraid that I’ll enter a waiting room full of women and men all in pink, all chanting some cancer slogan, trying to get me to buy pink legal pads, pink jewelry, pink floor mats, and pink whole wheat bread. I don’t know when I’ll make my appointment.
I do have an appointment to check my cervix for cancer for the fourth time, but I haven’t see any products for cervical cancer. I guess I can show up for the colposcopy wearing whatever I like. No one cares. The market only cares about my secondary sexual characteristics, not my primary ones. And that’s OK by me. I’d like to keep my cervix, uterus, and ovaries to myself. They’re mine and I’ll take responsibility for them.
If you want to do something for a woman with breast cancer, how about you take care of her kids while she’s going in for treatment, or drive her there and back? Or make a donation for research on something like adrenal cancer which has a poorer prognosis and less research wealth.
Every time I see a breast cancer commercial or a product being marketed with pink breast cancer ribbons, I think of Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Welcome to CancerLand” article in Harper’s Magazine. I particularly liked her observation that “men diagnosed with prostate cancer do not receive gifts of Matchbox cars.” A Google search for “testicular cancer products” only returns 312,000 results and most of those are for t-shirts and bracelets.
Google has 25,600,000 listings for “breast cancer products.” From a site devoted to all popular cancers, I now know that cervical cancer’s color is teal (which is nice because if I do get this cancer I’ve always liked teal and wouldn’t turn down a teal mug or t-shirt). I also discovered that testicular cancer’s color is orchid, which is pretty close to lavender so I sort of wonder how some marketing firm selected these colors. And I should probably tell my friends who love wearing black that they are supporting melanoma awareness. Although not all cancer product marketing sites agree on color. Testicular cancer’s color wars might be won by goldenrod.
I’m certain that in the 2050′s people will look back on this decade and cancer pink will be one of the identifying characteristics. Like pet rocks were of the 1970s. Let’s not treat cancer like a fad.
Childcraft: Science and Industry
The first thing we learn from this volume is that all living things come from parents that are like them. Yep, you are like your parents whether you like it or not. You look in the mirror and sometimes you’ll see your mother or father’s face. This is especially true as you age. It’s just science and you can’t fight it. I thought having a raccoon mask would have been kind of fun. I already had the freckles across my nose. It was hard for me as a child to accept that I would never have a monkey tail, so I understand if this concept disturbs you.
I enjoyed learning that six months after an egg hatches, “if it is a hen, it is ready to lay eggs.” But “if it is a male chick, it grows up to be a rooster.” And does nothing other than that. Children who grow up on farms soon learn that males aren’t really all that necessary. They are bigger, badder, and frequently stinkier than females, but if you really need one you can probably just borrow your neighbor’s. My nieces learned that there are three choices to make when you a farm animal has a male baby: keep it for breeding (unlikely), keep it and castrate it (more likely), or eat it (probably inevitable.) Sorry guys.
Boys and girls learn much more than animal babies can. But not the really cool stuff like how to fly, live under water, bring down an elk with your teeth and nails, or how to be taken care of for life just by making rumbling sounds in your throat.
Experiments
There are lots of experiments included in this volume, including some of my favorites. I loved growing bread mold. I’d fill several jars and try for different colors by spraying the bread with Lysol or hair spray or Windex. I remember being amazed that Lysol really worked and I didn’t get any color of mold at all for many many days.
After trying the celery and colored water experiment, Mom suggested using peonies instead. I was so proud of those white peonies with pink or blue outlines on their petals. I felt like I was a scientist and an artist.
I wish I had tried the rotten apple experiment that shows how germs can spread. You take a rotten apple and two good ones. One of the good ones gets scratched twice and one of those scratches is treated with iodine or Mercurochrome. We didn’t have either so I would have used Campho-Phenique. I really wonder how this experiment worked for kids back when you could get Mercurochrome. The FDA forbade its sale across state lines in 1998 after determining that it was not generally recognized as safe and effective. Maybe it was the safety using mercury rather than the effectiveness that was the real problem. I hope most kids found that the treated scratch on their apple didn’t rot. And I hope no parents, after seeing their child’s success, then decided to wash all their apples in mercury.
The book suggests the making of an aquarium or terrarium. Terrariums were very popular around 1974. I wanted to create my own and at that time either Frito’s or Chee-tos (correct spelling for that time) had seed samples tucked inside its packaging. I got cactus seeds. Growing cactus from seed is an exercise in patience. Not for a season, but for an annum. At least they were for me. But the suckers eventually came up and grew for a few years until a cat decided to take up extreme litter boxing.
I have to say that the concept of making your own rain is much better than the actual experiment. Watching drops fall from a pitcher filled with ice and held over a pan of steaming water just doesn’t measure up to the idea of ruining your sister’s softball game with a downpour.
Nowhere does the book warn you about doing Dr. Jekyll Mr. Hyde experiments. I tried to create such a potion with all sorts of liquids, including perfume. Perfume is not meant to be taken orally. Important childhood lesson.
Moms, Dads, and science
Parents are the most important item in science. You’ll need Mom to sew your butterfly catcher and to boil water. You’ll need Dad to tell you how to tell directions with his compass, to light matches, and to sing and talk while you feel his voice box. Sometimes you need both of them for a single experiment. To make a water wheel you need Mom to cut the lid from a large tin can and Dad to cut slits in the lid and twist the edges.
Did they really write that?
Animals do not have minds or souls. They were referring only to the animals you’ve eaten or will eat. I’m sure they weren’t referring to your pet. Your pet will go to heaven and wait for you there. Honestly. Do your trust me or some old author from the 1950s?
Machines
This was boring for me as a child and it’s boring as an adult. Combines are used for reaping wheat, using a claw hammer to remove a nail is easier than using your bare hands, an egg beater shows you how wheels with teeth work, electricity comes from generators, wool grows on sheep, many houses are made of wood, furnaces ares usually put in the basement. These facts just don’t leave a lot of room for imagination. I wanted to see speculation about the future. I thought maybe I’d see a personal jet pack or a space car. But the only prognostications Childcraft editors were willing to make were pretty weak: new medicines to prevent illnesses, faster and safer ways of traveling, cities where everyone can live in comfort. They must have missed seeing AIDS, airport congestion, or homelessness in their crystal ball. Luckily I watched Star Trek as a child so had a clearer version of things like DVDs, cell phones, automatic doors, and the Roomba vacuum.
MORE on the Childcraft collection:
Poems of Early Childhood
Storytelling and Other Poems
Folk and Fairy Tales
Animal Friends and Adventures
Life in Many Lands
Great Men and Famous Deeds
Exploring the World Around Us
Creative Play and Hobbies
Art for Children
