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Center for the Study of Children's
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Transcripts for January 2000 Programs #91-111 |
Program #91
January 3, 2000--For the New Babies of the Millenium
This is Recess and this is John Cech. We're talking about some of the things that are happening in the world of children's culture.
In Japan, during the first days of the new year, the Kakizome festival takes place; it's is dedicated to putting the first marks on paper for the new year, and it's become an occasion for Japanese children to demonstrate their grasp of traditional calligraphy. The practice itself began centuries ago in temple schools where, among other things, the art of calligraphy was taught. One was expected to write something mindfully beautiful on paper--a poem or a resolution for the year--something important to set the tone for the coming months.
For most of us the first mark that's put on paper about us is our name--something that sets a tone, in some cases, for lifetime. Here's a poem for all those new millenium babies, who have just been named.
Koren, Omar and Maryann
Cynthia, Tomasz, Charlemagne,
Florio, Koji and Philippa--
An angel gives us each our name.
Sometimes she sends it in a dream
Or on the wind
Or in the rain.
Sometimes she keeps it may years
A shining leaf on the family tree:
Abraham, Petra, or Timothy.
Sometimes she knows by a baby's gurgle
Or how she kicks before she's born.
"That's Anna," she says,
"Ready to dance.
And that's Kofi
Doing a back somersault,
And Liang the poet
Ready to rhyme."
And sometimes she whsipers it
In our mother's ear:
"Carlos, Fatima, Guinevere."
Or let's Papa hear it
While he's making a chair:
"Abduallah, Rosie, Esperanza, Pierre."
We don't know how she does it,
but each name fits just so:
Maya or Elvis or Meiku,
Benjamin or Yanee
Abigail or, simply, Joe.
©2000 by John Cech
Program #92
January 4, 2000--Rita Smith Lost & Found Essay: Jacob
Grimm
This is "Recess!" and this is John Cech. We're talking about some of the things that are happening in the world of children's culture. Here's Rita Smith with a Lost and Found Essay.
This transcript is currently unavailable.
Program #93
January 5, 2000--Soup
This is "Recess!" and this is John Cech. We're talking about some of the things that are happening in the world of children's culture.
My old world mother-in-law made the kind of soup that would restore peace and tranquility at the end of the most terrible horrible no-good very bad day. It was ambrosia--one soup had 14 vegetables, and we still don't know to this day where she found them all in the middle of winter. But we have the recipe, and even a video of her nimbly adding pinches of spices from memory. We'll keep cooking that soup in her memory--especially during January--National Soup Month.
If you want to start a soup tradition in your family, there's a delicious new book for you called Blue Moon Soup, with recipes by Gary Goss and illustratious by Jane Dyer. Mr. Goss perfected his soups in the Soup Kitchen Restaurant that he used to run in Northhampton, Massachussetts.
The recipes are divided into their natural tasting seasons. For instance, the winter soups include Ch-Ch-Chili; Brrrroccoli Soup au Gratin, a Hot Diggity Dog Soup made with, you guessed it, hot dogs; Twist and Shout, made with onions, mushrooms, tomatoes, twist noodles, garnished with fresh basil and, of all things, popcorn. There's an onion Sob Soup; a hot and sour Chinese soup called Zero-Zero Soup; a carribean black bean Polka Dot Soup; and a creamy, leeky, peesey Peace Soup that should be on the agenda of all international negotiations.
Mr. Goss also gives the new chef de soup in your household some tips about how to set the table and a few sound cooking rules (like not leaving pots of anything unattended on the stove). And at the end of the book, he provides some recipes for the things that often accompany soups--breads, muffins, salads, spreads, croutons. What a way to introduce kids to the joyful art of cooking, through these simple, hearty recipes. Let's see--tonite, I think we'll try the Soup of the Evening with a little Lewis Caroll to go with it:
(Sound clip.)
©2000 by John Cech
Program #94
January 6, 2000--Carl Sandburg
This is "Recess!" and this is John Cech. We're talking about some of the things that are happening in the world of children's culture.
It's Carl Sandburg's birthday today. He was born on a corn-husk-filled mattress in 1878 in the prairie town of Galesburg, Illinois, to Swedish immigrant parents. "I don't know who my ancesters were," he once joked, "but we've been descending for a long time." Beginning in Junior High, our English teachers would put on old scratchy records of his poems and we would hear his plaintive voice call to us:
(Sound clip.)
We were enthralled by his incantations, though we knew little about how his democratic thoughts had been sharpened by years of hard manual labor (he left school after the 8th grade and helped support his family delivering milk and newspapers, shoe-shining, harvesting, house-painting. He also spent a few years hoboing, did a brief stint in the army, and eventually managed to put himself through most of college, before he landed in Milwaukee, where he worked as an organizer for the Wisconsin Social Democratic Party and where, more importantly, he met Lilian Steichen in 1908. They married and moved to Chicago where Sandburg had a career as a journalist while he wrote his first volumes of poems and they raised their three daughters for whom Sandburg invented his incomparable Rootabaga Stories about the Village of Cream Puffs, Blixie Bimber, Slipfoot, Peter Potato Blossom Wishes, and Shush Shush the Big Buff Banty Hen Who Laid an Egg in the Postmaster's Hat. And these stories are all just as fresh today as they were in 1922, when they were published, spilling out into the world like the children of Hot Cookie Pan and Splinters.
Sandburg went on to become one of America's most famous performing poets, a Pulitizer prize winning historian of Abaraham Lincoln, and one of those wonderful voices from our progressive past that still manage to be heard over the clatter of our present, whispering to us.
(Sond clip.)
©2000 by John Cech
Program #95
January 7, 2000--A Shelley Frazer Mickle Remembering: Oatmeal
This is "Recess!" and this is John Cech. We're talking about some of the things that are happening in the world of children's culture. It's National Oat Meal Month, and Shelley Frazer Mickle has a remembering for us:
This transcript is currently unavailable.
Program #96
January 10, 2000--Up in Smoke
This is "Recess!" and this is John Cech. We're talking about some of the things that are happening in the world of children's culture.
I was tuned in to The Real World one night and it suddenly struck me that everyone in the cast of MTV's hit show about the supposedly "real" lives of young people today was smoking. Not awkward, peer bonding puffs, but fully, addictive drags. Just like the kind, unfortunately, that I learned to do years ago in high school, back when the cool thing was to roll up your pack of unfiltered cigarettes in the sleeve of your tee shirt, so that you had both hands free to comb your d.a.
The first Surgeon General's Report on the subject really put a crimp in the joy of smoking in the early 1960s. And until I finally kicked the habit twenty years later I could never rest easily with this costly, consuming, and increasingly less popular addiction. In fact, I gave it up at the impassioned request of my then teenage daughter--when I'd asked her what she'd like for her birthday, she told me the only present I could give her was to stop smoking. And wise, outraged teenagers (especially those from families with smokers) have always played a steady part in this healthy reform.
But now the habit is back again, by some estimates giving us nearly 3,000 new teenage smokers a day. It's been brought to us largely by indifference, affluence, and the irresponsibility of film makers, among others, who have been putting cigarettes in their characters' (especially their young characters') hands for a decade now. I'm convinced, in order to give them something to do with their fingers, and to float clouds of risk-taking non-chalance above their heads--also to help finance their pictures through strategic product placement.
But there's something new blowing in the wind, especially for parents who are watching their children take up this old habit--one of these promising gusts of fresh air comes to us in the form of a new book by Michael Mannion called How to Help Your Teenager Stop Smoking, which appears this month fromWelcome Rain Publishers. Mannion, a well-known medical writer, provides important information for parents about how to understand the problem's dynamics today--at a time when many teenagers stubbornly insist that they would rather be thin smokers than fat quitters. Mannion also offers sound advice about how parents can help, and, most importantly, how teenagers can to reclaim their own bodies and psyches.
©2000 by John Cech
Program #97
January 11, 2000--Koren Stembridge on the Internet: No Smoking
Sites
This is "Recess!" and this is John Cech. We're talking about some of the things that are happening in the world of children's culture. Here's Koren Stembridge, on the Internet.
On January 11, 1964 Surgeon General Luther Terry released the first report on the harmful effects of cigarette smoking. Thirty-six years later, here are some of the basic facts:
First--80% of all smokers become addicted to cigarettes before they turn 18.
Second--Smoking kills 1,000 Americans each day.
Now, you don't need a degree in advanced math to tell you that the tobacco companies need 800 teenagers a day to begin smoking--just in order to replace the smokers who are dying.
If you are a parent or other concerned adult, and you wonder how to do what you can to ensure that your child can brave the barrage of advertising and the weight of the pressure exerted by his or her peers in order to remain "smoke-free," then log onto the Internet and check out some of these resources (so that you can recommend them to your children).
At the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids site, you can search an ABC's of smoking to find out how smoking contributes to everything from allergies, to impotence, to wrinkles. This site is definitely not for the faint of stomach. The ABCs include a number of graphic photographsof smokers' arteries, hearts, lungs and brains--showing clear evidence of how smoking pollutes the body.
Eduzone's site features a discussion of how the tobacco companies entice young people to smoke by using images of youth, wealth, and glamour. Here you will also find a set of guidelines for parents to use when talking to their children about smoking. (It's especially good at getting to the reality of how the seductiveness of the ads--a persuasive tack to take with teenagers who may be sensitive to being maniuplated.)
But if you or your children only visit one anti-smoking site, make sure you send them to the TRUTH site, sponsored by Florida's Students Working Against Tobacco (or SWAT). Designed for teens, by teens, this site has an MTV-style appeal. TRUTH was created with funds from Florida's 1997 $13 billion settlement with the tobacco industry.
You may have read about TRUTH's series of anti-smoking ads. These ads are both controversial and effective and you can watch them online.
My personal favorite is an ad called the "Demon Awards." This spot parodies a Hollywood awards show that features the "Most deaths caused this year" category, with the nominess of illicit drugs, smoking, and suicide. As you may have guessed, the demon who represents smoking "wins" the award for the ninth consecutive time--ironically, to the cheers of the crowd.
If these ads give you the shivers, they are meant to--so will the counter on the site that tells you how many teens started smoking this year. When I visited recently, that counter read more than two million.
And for a little comic relief, don't leave the TRUTH site without checking out "Screaming Mimi." Mimi is an irrepressible little animated girl, who screams "murderer!" at the adult who smokes while standing next to her. I found myself silently cheering Mimi on as she refuses to stand still and silent in someone else's cloud of smoke.
Links to these sites and other may be found at www.recess.ufl.edu.
©2000 by Koren Stembridge
Program #98
January 12, 2000--Elaine Needelman: "Kukla Fran and Ollie"
This is "Recess!" and this is John Cech. We're talking about some of the things that are happening in the world of children's culture. Elaine Needelman has found three old friends for her media review this week.
This transcript is currently unavailable.
Program #99
January 13, 2000--Rita Smith Lost and Found Essay: Horatio
Alger
This is "Recess!" and this is John Cech. We're talking about some of the things that are happening in the world of children's culture. Here's Rita Smith with a Lost and Found Essay.
This program is currently unavailable.
Program #100
January 14, 2000--Two Yellow Kids
This is "Recess!" and this is John Cech. We're talking about some of the things that are happening in the world of children's culture.
It's a wonderful coicidence that the one of the early practititoners of the comic strip, Richard Felton Outcault, should have been born on the same day, today, in 1863, on which The Simpsons animated television show would premier, over a century later, in 1990. And it's even more synchronistic when you consider that both featured, as their main character, a yellow kid.
Outcault's Yellow Kid was part of a gang of scruffy Irish and other immigrant children who inhabited Hogan's Alley, one of those grim corridors of New York City's "Fourth Ward." The kids were a multi-ethnic chorus that quipped about the comings and goings on in the neighborhood--arugments, evictions, parades, politics, races, deaths, holidays, circuses. The bald-headed, jug-eared, gap-toothed, always cheerful Yellow Kid got his name from the oversized yellow nigthshirt that he started to wear in 1896, when the cartoon was a year old and the newspaper, The New York World, where it was appearing, had figured out how to dye the shirt that eye-catching color. Outcault used the Yellow Kid's nightshirt as a dialogue balloon for his remarks--which were often simply his famous exclamation, "Hully Gee." But the Kid also carried jingoistic slogans that fanned the fires for the Spanish American war and led to the name, "yellow journalism." The comic became so popular that it grew from a small cartoon only a few inches long to a complex, full-page picture--and it became one of the first cartoon ever to generate wide-spread merchandising tie-ins. It was, however, primarily a comic for adults, like the animated cartoon program, "The Simpsons," that gave us our other Yellow Kid in the form of the outrageous, incorrigible Bart, the brainchild of Matt Groening, whose famously vulgar phrases at the time lit up the pop culture lexicon.
"The Simpsons" began as what was called a "bumper" or fill-in spot on the Tracey Ullman comedy show, and was so popular that Groening was asked to come up with an idea for a regular program. In the fifteen minutes he had to wait to see the producer, he dreamed up this archetypally atypical American family and their satiric involvement with the comings and goings on--the politics, social events, people and beliefs of their community. And, like that first Yellow Kid, the Yellow Family, which premiered ten years ago today, has a vast audience of fans, merchandise galore, web sites, and even a couple of CD's of their music. The more things change, the more Simpsonic they remain .....
(Sound clip.)
Recess is a co-production of the University of Florida's WUFT-FM and the Center for the Study of Children's Literature and Media. The shows this week were written by John Cech, Elaine Needelman, Rita Smith, and Koren Stembridge. Mary Showstark helps research these programs. The program is recorded by Richard Drake and edited by Henri Pensis. Funding for the national distribution of these programs is provided, in part, by the Alachua County Friends of the Library.
Program #101
January 17, 2000--Koren Stembridge on the Internet: Martin Luther
King Day
This is "Recess!" and this is John Cech. We're talking about some of the things that are happening in the world of children's culture.
This coming Monday is our nationally designated holiday celebrating the life and work of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.. Hopefully, over the next few days you will read or hear King's famous "I Have a Dream" speech. Those glorious words, so passionately spoken, remind us of the world we strive to live in.
Hopefully, too, you will have some time over the weekend to log on to the Internet and to reaquaint yourself (or your children) with this amazing man who dedicated his life to showing us our better angels.
Begin with LIFE Magazine's tribute to Martin Luther King, Jr. In these riveting photographs, King springs to life, captured in classic images from the magazine. One of them is particularly powerful: it's a 1960 picture of King, arms crossed, standing on the steps of the state capital in Montgomery Alabama is a study of strength and determination coupled with responsibility and exhaustion.
Next, visit the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project from Stanford University. Here you can view a chronology of King's life and accomplishments and read the texts of some of King's most famous speeches, among them, the text for the "Letter From Birmingham Jail," the ringing March on Washington "I Have a Dream" speech, and "I've Been to the Mountaintop," King's last sermon. These words leave one inspired, shaken, and intensely moved.
Finish your tour at the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change. This center was established in 1968 by Mrs. Coretta Scott King as a living memorial to the work of her husband. At the Center we are reminded to "Celebrate a Day On, Not a Day Off" by volunteering our time, or performing an act of service to our communities.
This Martin Luther King Day offers one possibilies to pause and reflect on the contributions of this remarkable leader in the struggle for Civil Rights. We can't remind our children too often and whatever ways we can, including the internet, the importance of having the courage to follow a dream as vital as one that Dr. King honored with his work...and with his life.
Links to these sites and others may be found at www.recess.ufl.edu
©2000 by Koren Stembridge
Program #102
January 18, 2000--Danny Kaye
This is "Recess!" and this is John Cech. We're talking about some of the things that are happening in the world of children's culture.
(Sound clip.)
That's the opening to one of Danny Kaye's best-known songs from the 1952 movie in which Kaye starred as the 19th Danish storyteller. The film that not only revived interest in Andersen's life and work, giving him a whole new, glowing public image, but it also made Danny Kaye's a household name as an interpreter of the imaginative, innocent, playful world of childhood--an association that Kaye sought to honor for the next 35 years of his life through his service as UNICEF's "Ambassador at Large," in which he tirelessly visited communities, schools and health facilities in developing countries around the globe, bringing, as one commentator has noted, a "sense of hope and a moment of laughter to the Children of the Third World."
Born in Brooklyn 87 years ago today, the son of an immigrant Russian tailor, Kaye's early life was itself a kind of Hans Christian Andersen-like rise to fame from the ugly duckling barnyard of obscurity. He had enormous and precocious talents as a commedian, a mimic, a singer and dancer, an actor. One of his singulargifts was the ability to do those lightening-fast, show-stopping patter songs and dialogues that were the real crowd-pleasers of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas and the vaudeville stage. One of the most famous of these signature tongue-twisting, mind-bending bits is from his 1956 movie, The Court Jester, in which Kaye plays Hawkins the bumbling, innocent clown caught up in life and death intrigues who is trying to memorize the formula "the pellet with the poison's in the vessel with the pestle...." Happily, the shy, awkward, good-natured souls that Kaye often played in his 17 movies always triumphs in the end--these are Hollywood's versions of the fairy tale--and like those old, durable tales, despite everything we know about the facts of life, they nevertheless offer us hope. The Russians, among others, have an ancient tradition of the holy fool, someone who seems ill-equipped to deal with the rigors of cruel reality but who neverthelss survives and thrives because he is blessed, and he generously passes those blessings on to others. That, it seems to me, is Danny Kaye's gentle, tender legacy:
(Sound clip.)
©2000 by John Cech
Program #103
January 19, 2000--Rita Smith Lost and Found Essay: Manners
This is "Recess!" and this is John Cech. We're talking about some of the things that are happening in the world of children's culture. Here's Rita Smith with a Lost and Found Essay.
This transcript is currently unavailable.
Program #104
January 20, 2000--Shelley Frazer Mickle Remembering: Lines of
Communication
This is "Recess!" and this is John Cech. We're talking about some of the things that are happening in the world of children's culture. Here's a Shelley Frazer Mickle Remembering.
This transcript is currently unavailable.
Program #105
January 21, 2000--Elaine Needelman Watching the Media: Two Iranian
Children's Films
This is "Recess!" and this is John Cech. We're talking about some of the things that are happening in the world of children's culture. Elaine Needelman has a review for us today of two Iranian children's films.
This transcript is currently unavailable.
Program #106
January 24, 2000--The Littlest 49ers
This is "Recess!" and this is John Cech. We're talking about some of the things that are happening in the world of children's culture.
Gold was discovered this morning on the American River in California in 1848, on a construction site for a saw mill that was being built for John Sutter, a Swiss immigrant who had become, in the ten years since his arrival in California, a baronial figure, presiding over vast, prosperous land holdings that included a fort, farms and vineyards, herds of cattle, and, in 1848, the first flecks of gold that would cause one of the largest and most concentrated migrations of people in our nation's history. Sutter had an inkling of what the news of the discovery might mean to his plans for expanding his personal empire, and so he swore his workers to secrecy. But within a few months, the news had leaked out in San Francisco, a sleepy port of less than a thousand souls, which emptied that spring as its citizens went north to the diggins. By the end of the year, President Polk had offically announced the discovery to the nation, and, as one commentator put it, "the world rushed in." San Francisco swelled in size to thirty thousand by 1850, with many thousands more mining north of the city and on route to the west where, it was said, you could pick gold up from the banks of a river--enough in a few months to last you a lifetime.
Among the prospectors were many children and young people. Most came overland with their parents, but groups of students from Harvard and other colleges, most of them still teenagers, organized themselves into companies and took boats from Boston on the six-month journey around the Horn to the gold fields. One of the most celebrated appearances of a child in the roaring San Francisco of the 1850s was that of Miss Anna Maria Quinn, who at the age of seven dazzled the crowd of the Metropolitan Theater by reciting the whole first act of Hamlet from memory. The next week she did performances from long-forgotten shows, playing little Eva and Little Pickle to admiring throngs. Within a few months, she and her parents set sail for Australia, where gold had been discovered in 1851, and simply vanished from recorded history. But younger children were so scarce in the "instant" city of San Francisco and in the gold fields, that when they materialized in the midst of the grizzled miners, they were treated as miracles, like the foundling child in Brett Harte's famous story, "The Luck of Roaring Camp," whose very presence reforms a lawless town and opens a seam of hope for its inhabitants whose dreams of gold had been dashed by the bitter realities of life in the diggins.
©2000 by John Cech
Program #107
January 25, 2000--Rita Smith Lost and Found Essay: Boy Scouts
Books
This is "Recess!" and this is John Cech. We're talking about some of the things that are happening in the world of children's culture.
This transcript is currently unavailable.
Program #108
January 26, 2000--Koren Stembridge on the Internet: Outer
Spaces
This is "Recess!" and this is John Cech. We're talking about some of the things that are happening in the world of children's culture. Here's Koren Stembridge on the Internet, with her eyes on Outer Spaces.
This transcript is currently unavailable.
Program #109
January 27, 2000--Mozart's First
This is "Recess!" and this is John Cech. We're talking about some of the things that are happening in the world of children's culture.
(Sound clip.)
You're hearing part of the first composition by the world's most astonishing musical genius, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The little Mozart was between five and six years old when he wrote this. His father, Leopold, a court musician in Salzburg, Austria, copied it down, as he did many of his son's first compositions, until the boy could write himself.
Little Wolferl, as he was called, began to show his musical gifts at four, when he started teaching himself to play by ear the music that his sister, Nannerl, who was five years older, was learning for her keyboard lessons. He took up the violin when he was six, and by seven he was playing the organ--standing up--because he couldn't touch the pedals sitting down.
When Wolferl was about six, his father took the little boy and and his sister, the only two of the Mozart children to have survived beyond infancy, on their first tour of the courts of Europe where Leopold hoped that they would be well paid for the musical shows that he had arranged for them to put on together. Certainly they were welcomed; the word quickly spread about the young prodigy, and he was soon the darling of the courts. He was small and delightful, a gifted improviser. Among the many astonishments he presented were his uncanny ability to finish a composition that someone else had started, and his ear for mimicing all the hits of the day. Even the Empress Maria Theresa was so pleased with his performance that she allowed him to sit on her lap, put his arms around her neck and kiss her. Kings greeted him effusively, Queens fawned over him and fed him with their own royal fingers from their own plates.
Papa Mozart knew that the magic, even of such a prodigy as his son, would wear off once the boy had grown, and so he toured with the children incessantly, often for a year at a time, hoping to cash in on his son's celebrity. But the trips weren't without their price: Wolferl had rheumatic fever twice; typhoid, which nearly killed him, at nine; and a touch of small pox at 11. One doctor who observed him did not think that he would live long.
Yet he did survive his childhood, and each year as he became less a child prodigy, his musical talents only grew. By the time he was eight, just two years after he'd begun, he was already writing sonatas like this. It was, as his father said, "a miracle."
(Sound clip.)
©2000 by John Cech
Program #110
January 28, 2000--Federal Theater Project
This is "Recess!" and this is John Cech. We're talking about some of the things that are happening in the world of children's culture.
The recent film by Tim Robbins, "Cradle Will Rock," which has been receiving a great deal of attention in the past weeks, is based on a musical by Marc Blitzstein about the workers' right to strike that was not allowed to open in 1937 because of the objections of a congressional committee that was busy ferreting out allegedly "unAmerican" activities--a preview of the McCarthy hearings of the 1950s.
Blitzstein's play, directed by Orson Welles, was funded by the Federal Theater Project, a division of the WPA (the Works Progress Administration) to give work to struggling members of the theater community during the Depression. The Federal Theater Project also gave us our first (and to date our only) national children's theater, through its support of children's theaters in every major city in America. These wildly popular theater units offered serious, high quality, inexpensive drama to young audiences and their parents, many of whom had never been to the theater before. Most of the productions were based on classic material like Cinderella, Aladdin, Hansel and Gretel, Peter Pan, and Treasure Island.
But the Federal Theater for Youth also hoped that its plays would be educational, in the deepest sense. For example, its version of The Emperor's New Clothes emphasized the need to challenge the arrogant self-centeredness of some authority figures. One of the Federal Theater for Youth's most celebrated clashes with America authority figures occured over a play called The Revolt of the Beavers, about the struggle of hard-working beavers who are being tyrannized by their bosses, other beavers who have bestowed on themselves the priviledge of eating ice cream and moving around on roller skates that are forbidden to the long-suffering workers. One well-known drama critic labelled the drama "Mother Goose Marxism" and quite quickly the play was shut down in New York City.
The Federal Theater for Youth closed for good in June of 1939 with the cutting off of funds for the Federal Theater Project as a whole. And Yasha Frank, one of the guiding spirits of the FTY, whose production of Pinocchio had inspired Walt Disney to make his cartoon feature of the tale, took the occasion of the last performace of this play in New York City to ask the salient political question. Instead of ending the play with the puppet becoming a boy, Frank closed the performance with the demolition of the sets and the puppet appearing for the last time on stage in a simple pine coffin, which was taken by the crowd--actors, stage hands, audience--from the theater to Times Square, as they chanted, "Who killed Pinocchio?" And at the rally they held there, on 42nd Street, while the flashbulbs popped, they read off the list of the congressmen who had voted to close the Theater Project and put the puppet out of work. What a piece of theater.
©2000 by John Cech
Program #111
January 31, 2000--Koren Stemberidge on the Internet: Black History
Month
This is "Recess!" and this is John Cech. We're talking about some of the things that are happening in the world of children's culture. Koren Stembridge is on the internet for us, with some information about Black History Month, which begins tomorrow.
February is Black History Month, the perfect time to log on to the web with your child to visit the many sites honoring Americans of African descent.
The Afro American Almanac is an excellent place to begin our journey. Here you will find biographies of great African American men and women and you can pour through their collection of fascinating historical documents. For example, do your children know that Thomas Jefferson's original draft of the Declaration of Independence contained language condemning KingGeorge III's indulgence of the Slave Trade. You can read his omitted text here, along with other important historical documents.
Another feature of the Afro American Almanac is a selection of folk tales, where you can read stories like "Why There Is Day and Night," "Why Women Do Not Have Beards,"and "Why the Sun Lives in the Sky."
Next, visit Encyclopedia Britannica's Harlem Renaissance--atruly glorious site to be online, with exhibits about those extraordinary figures of literature, art and entertainment who sprang out of 1920s New York City at the height of the Jazz Age. There are wonderful multimedia resources here, including video footage of Fats Walker singing "This Joint is Jumpin." See and hear poet Langston Hughes as he reads his poem "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" and watch Bill "Bojangles" Robinson as he performs his famous Stair Dance.
AFRO-America's Black History Museum features important events in African American history. Here you can read articles about the Tuskegee Airmen or the Negro Baseball Leagues.
The Timeline of the American Civil Rights Movement takes us from the 1954 Supreme Court decision on Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas--where segregation was ruled unconstitutional--through key events in the Civil Rights movement--to the 1963 March on Washington. Photographs and links to additional resources make this pivotal time come alive.
Finish up your tour by stopping at Louisiana State University's Faces of Science. We all know about the amazing George Washington Carver who developed synthetic products ranging from chili sauce to synthetic marble to shaving cream. But take a little time and get to know a few of the many other famous black biologists, chemists, engineers and inventors who have contributed to the body of scientific knowledge. They are guaranteed to inspire.
Links to these sites and others may be found at www.recess.ufl.edu
©2000 by Koren Stembridge
