Games Acknowledgements Play

At the end of Fantasy Baseball, author Alan Gratz thanks a number of writing colleagues (including Laurel Snyder) for their support, and a number of literary estates, including those of Brian Jacques, Madeleine L’Engle, and the still-quite-alive Ingrid Law, for permitting him to use characters under copyright.

Also among the latter group is: “the estate of Ruth Spencer-Davies for letting me borrow the inimitable Nanny Mae and her feline companion Mrs. P.”

There was no Ruth Spencer-Davies.

Nanny Mae shares some characteristics with P. L. Travers’s Mary Poppins and perhaps Christianna Brand’s Nurse Matilda (better known as the cinematic Nanny McPhee). But, whether pushed by copyright requirements or not, she appears to be Gratz’s own creation.

The conceit of Fantasy Baseball is a boy caught in a realm of make-believe characters. We readers have to believe that Nanny Mae is such a character, from a series we’ve never read or perhaps one we’ve forgotten. And the line in the acknowledgements serves that fictional purpose.

I’m running this on a Tuesday because Dorothy Gale is a major character in Fantasy Baseball, founder of the team Alex Metcalf finds himself playing for. Other characters from the Oz books also appear, including Scraps, Tik-Tok, and Jack Pumpkinhead. The threat underlying the plot is that those characters will be forgotten in our culture and disappear from the playing field.

But if Nanny Mae lives on with no other evidence for her existence on the web, then surely Jack Pumpkinhead will, too.

The Earliest “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”

For most Americans, the word supercalifragilisticexpialidocious is insuperably linked to the 1964 movie adaptation of Mary Poppins and its score, written by the Sherman brothers.

Ben Zimmer at the Visual Thesaurus, with the help of Merriam-Webster, recently shared a much earlier printed use of the term “Supercaliflawjalisticexpialadoshus.” As shown above, it appeared in Syracuse University’s Daily Orange newspaper in 1931. Humor columnist Helen Herman claimed to have concocted the word several years before, “or at least, I have my own interpretation of its pronunciation.”

The Shermans themselves never claimed to have invented the word. Instead, they recalled hearing it at a summer camp in the 1920s. There’s no obvious connection between them and Helen Herman, though it’s hard to imagine the word would have developed independently.

In 1949 and 1951, songwriters Gloria Parker and Barney Young published a song with the spelling “Supercalafajalistickespialadojus.” After Mary Poppins, they sued the Sherman brothers for copyright infringement. The judge ruled that the songs were different enough. But weren’t the titles basically the same? Yes, but titles can’t be copyrighted.

P. L. Travers and the Paris Review

Back when The Paris Review put its entire stash of author interviews online, I skimmed the list for favorite children’s fantasy writers, and didn’t see any.

But I missed the conversation with P. L. Travers, whence this anecdote comes:

The other day two little boys accosted me in the street and said to me, “You are the lady who wrote Mary Poppins, aren’t you?”

And I admitted it, and said, “How do you know?” And they said, “Because we sing in the choir, and the vicar told us.”

So, clearly, they had thrown off their surplices and rushed after me to catch me. So I said, “Well, do you like her?” And they both nodded vigorously. I then said, “What is it you like about her?”

And one of them said, “Well, she’s so ordinary and then…” and having said “and then” he looked around for the proper word, and couldn’t find it.

And I said, “You don’t have to say any more. That ‘and then’ says everything.”

And the other little boy said, “Yes, and I’m going to marry her when I grow up.”

And I saw the first one clench his fists and look very belligerent. I felt there might be trouble and so I said, “Well, we’ll just have to see what she thinks about it, won’t we? And in the meantime, my house is just there—come in and have a lemonade.” So they did.

Further discussion covers whether Mary Poppins stories reflect the Mother Goddess or Zen parables.