Ernie Morrison’s Tutor, Miss Zenobia Frierson

I first mentioned that Ernie Morrison had an individual tutor while he worked at the Hal Roach Studio back here.

At that time, I knew that tutor was a black woman. She appeared in a couple of photos that also showed Fern Carter teaching the white kids in the Our Gang movies. But I didn’t know that woman’s name.

News stories about Ernie’s departure from the studio in 1924 reveal his tutor at that time: Zenobia Frierson (her first name also rendered in newspapers as “Znobia” and “Zenovia”). Using newspapers and other information, I’ve assembled this brief profile of her.

Zenobia Evelyn Frierson was born in Texas—probably in 1897, though I’ve seen documents stating the year as 1895 and 1898. She studied at Wiley College in Marshall, a historically black college founded in 1873 by a bishop in the Methodist Episcopal Church. I haven’t found a yearbook or other document about her studies.

By 1924 Frierson was in Los Angeles, working as Ernie Morrison’s tutor. Under California law, he’d probably needed three hours of lessons on each working day since the fall of 1918, when he’d turned six. Given that Frierson probably graduated from college around that year, she may well not have been his first tutor. But she could have had the job in 1922–24 while Ernie was working on the Our Gang films.

After traveling with the Morrisons in 1925, Frierson returned to Los Angeles, where she married Louis Payton Allen on 15 Sept 1928. He was also from Texas, born in 1882. In the 1940 U.S. Census he was listed as a waiter on a railroad; if that had been his profession all along, he presumably traveled a lot. An October item in the California Eagle, the newspaper of Los Angeles’s black community, referred to the bride as “Mrs. Zenobia Frierson-Allen,” but she soon used only her husband’s surname.

In 1930, Zenobia Allen was living in a rented house on 49th Place in Los Angeles. Census records list her occupation as “secretary” of a “Christian organization.” She was head of a household that included her mother, Marjorie Blye, and a young roomer, Helen Boyd, but no children. Louis P. Allen wasn’t listed as living with them. Interestingly, the actress Louise Beavers and her family lived nearby.

In that decade Zenobia Allen appeared regularly in the Eagle as part of African-American social events. She helped to organize Wiley alumni gatherings. She signed a protest against hiring discrimination at the telephone company. In 1935 she started to work for the Angelus Funeral Home as a “receptionist”—though of course being the first person to speak to grieving families was a position with great responsibility. The photo above dates from 1934 or before.

By 1940, the Allens’ marriage had definitely broken up. Louis was living with a new wife, Inez. She was a manicurist while he worked for a railroad. He died that October.

After World War 2, Zenobia E. Allen gained national visibility as a “supreme epistoleus” of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority. In that role she traveled the country and corresponded with Mary MacLeod Bethune.

In 1955, after twenty years at the funeral home, Zenobia Allen moved to work at a local savings and loan. That fall she married Claude A. Jolly, a real estate and investment broker, with her mother looking on. The Los Angeles Tribune reported:

Romance of the popular and attractive Greekletter figure and the prominent businessman came as a surprise to the local community at large, where they are well known…

Unfortunately, Claude Jolly died in August 1957, less than two years later.

Zenobia Jolly continued to appear at AKA sorority events over the next few years, but she appears to have retired by the 1960s—probably comfortably, given her second husband’s wealth. Zenobia E. Jolly still owned real estate when she died in October 1982.

I haven’t found any mention of Zenobia Allen Jolly discussing how one of her first jobs was to tutor and travel with the young entertainer Ernie Morrison. She appears in print simply as a pillar of Los Angeles’s African-American community at mid-century. If she hadn’t had such a rare name, her connection with show business would be invisible.

“The following routine hardly constitutes a ‘vacation’”

In March 1924, for the first time in more than six years, eleven-year-old Ernie Morrison didn’t have a movie to make.

He had no call time the Hal Roach Studio. He wouldn’t spend hours with the other kids he’d worked and played with for the past two years. (Ernie had his own tutor, so at least he wasn’t also cut off from Fern Carter’s studio classroom.)

The end of Ernie’s $250 per working week salary would no doubt affect the Morrison family finances, but not immediately. His father, Joseph, who had run a market before entering show business, evidently invested some of those earnings in what the 17 September New York Evening Journal called “a string of ice cream parlors and frocery [sic] stores in Los Angeles.” In addition, the 18 December Savannah Tribune indicated he owned the Four Brown Candy Factory. The African-American press treated Joseph Morrison as a admirable entrepreneur.

It’s notable that the Morrison family and the Hal Roach Studio didn’t cut ties. Joseph continued to play black men in the movies, performing opposite Gene “Pineapple” Jackson and Allen “Farina” Hoskins in “Circus Fever.” Ernie’s little sister Dorothy Morrison appeared as Farina’s girlfriend in “The Love Bug,” with Joseph along as her father. In 1925 she would make “Isn’t Life Terrible?” with Charley Chase.

In late June, Ernie himself returned to Our Gang unit for a week (at his previous salary) to finish shooting “Fast Company,” a short begun over a year before. (Harold Lloyd’s young brother-in-law, Jack Davis, returned from military school for the same shoot.) That movie proved to be the coda to Ernie’s long Rolin/Hal Roach Studio career, but decades later he still had good things to say about Roach.

An item in the 24 May Colton Daily Courier revealed how Ernie was spending most of his days:

Sunshine Sammy, world famous little comedian and formerly featured player in Hal E. Roach’s “Our Gang” comedies, has a complaint to enter. . . . his father, Joseph Morrison, well known candy manufacturer, promised Sammy a good long vacation. Sammy, in his aforesaid complaint, says the following routine hardly constitutes a ‘vacation’—“Three to four hours a day study under his special teacher, Miss Zenovia [sic] Frierson. One hour violin lesson each day from James B. Warren. Miscellaneous and incidental other hours spent in perfecting himself in fencing, boxing, wrestling and in his ‘spare’ moments he composed a wonderful waltz, “Sunshine Sammy is a Good Old Scout.”

The same newspaper had reported on that waltz back on 3 May, saying “hundred of congratulatory messages” had come for Ernie. That article added:

The fact that he has become a composer of the first rank is only incidental with Sammy’s plans and he will soon spring a surprise on his friends, that will prove momentous in amusement circles.

COMING UP: Big plans.

Integrating Our Gang’s Schools

The Hal Roach Studio’s Our Gang series was notable from the beginning in showing black and white kids playing together on a mostly equal basis.

However, they didn’t go to school with each other—not for years.

Many American school systems were segregated in the early 1920s, either by law or (as in Los Angeles) by a combination of real-estate covenants and administrative moves that shuttled most black, Mexican, and Asian kids into certain schools.

At first the Hal Roach Studio’s school for its young actors replicated that situation, though it’s not clear if that was ever a goal. Ernie Morrison had been under contract for years when the series started, and he had a private tutor. Judging by photos like the one above from 1923, that tutor was a black woman.

In September 1922, having become responsible for educating more kids, Hal Roach hired Fern Carter (1893–1961) to run a school within the studio. She’s the woman standing in this publicity photo next to director Robert McGowan. She remained the teacher for the series’ main cast for more than twenty years.

Ernie Morrison continued to study with his tutor, however. It’s possible that race had no bearing on that arrangement. He and his father might have preferred that individual attention. It’s also quite conceivable that race was a factor. The Morrisons might have wanted to preserve that woman’s job, for instance, while the studio or other kids’ parents couldn’t imagine hiring her to teach the whole group. Or segregated schooling might simply have seemed like the norm. 

In those same early years, almost all of the Our Gang shorts were about children outside of school. Titles like “Saturday Morning,” “July Days,” and “Sunday Calm” reflect the focus on kids having free time to get into trouble. Physical comedy worked better when the cast wasn’t stuck to their desks.

Every so often, however, a movie showed the gang in a classroom. “Boys to Board” (1923) was set at a small boarding school, orphans preferred. “Lodge Night” (1923) showed little Joe Cobb as the new kid in a one-room school before shifting to other locations. Eventually all of “Commencement Day” (1924) took place in and around such a school.

And in all three of those movies, Ernie Morrison’s character isn’t in class with the white kids. He—and his little sibling Farina—still play with the white boys. In “Lodge Night” all the boys are part of a club spoofing the KKK. In “Commencement Day” Ernie has set up a merry-go-round near the school, charging kids some of their lunch for a ride.

In “Boys to Board” Ernie runs a delivery service, bringing Joe to the boarding school. That puts him in the position to rescue the white boys, so his outsider status actually makes him a hero. But it also appears that Ernie’s character doesn’t go to school at all.

As a result, those movies didn’t challenge audiences of the time with the sight of black and white kids in a classroom together. For some Americans, of course, that would have seemed normal, or at least unremarkable. But other white viewers might have objected.

During those years, Allen “Sunny” Hoskins was too young to go to school, and so was his character Farina. But eventually he grew up. In “Seeing the World” (1927), Farina is conspicuous among the students under teacher James Finlayson.

From then on, whenever audiences saw Our Gang in a classroom, that school was integrated. Starting in the early 1930s, more stories took place in school, and Farina, Stymie, Buckwheat, and other black kids (one even played by Dorothy Dandridge) were always on an equal basis with the white kids.

Likewise, behind the scenes Sunny Hoskins and his successors attended Fern Carter’s classes alongside their white cast mates. In fact, Carter described Sunny as her brightest student. And he, like most of the Our Gang alumni, recalled her fondly.

“Historic Children’s Voices” Coming from American Antiquarian Society

The American Antiquarian Society in Worcester will launch a website on “Historic Children’s Voices, 1799-1899.”

Its introductory page explains: “The holdings to be digitized are not children’s literature, i.e., works created BY adults FOR children, but rather are direct testimony as well as imaginative works created BY children. As such, they constitute an archive of historical evidence not previously accessible.”

The materials to be digitized include diaries, letters, stories, poems, and the AAS’s “large amateur newspaper collection—most printed on home parlor presses.” There will be 15,000 pages of content in all.

Those presses were very popular in the late 1800s. When L. Frank Baum issued the Rose Lawn Home Journal and later self-published works on stamp collecting and chicken farming, he was among thousands of young people working their own small presses.

Accompanying the website, the AAS will host an in-person and online symposium on 2–3 May featuring panel discussions on “Authentic Children’s Voices,” “Archival Silences,” “Visual Culture of Children’s Production,” and “Hearing the Child’s Voice.”

On 5–9 August, the AAS will host an institute for K-12 teachers on the subject, with hands-on workshops using the collection and a field trip to Lowell National Historical Park.

What the New Spider-Man Comes Home to

Back in 2014, it was widely reported that Captain America: The Winter Soldier was a superhero movie crossed with a 1970s political thriller. That’s why the sight of Robert Redford, star of Three Days of the Condor, All the President’s Men, and Brubaker, in the film was so resonant.

In the same way, I think Spider-Man: Homecoming as a superhero movie crossed with a 1980s high-school romantic comedy. The sort of movie on which John Hughes made his name. The genre that such other talents as Cameron Crowe, Martha Coolidge, Amy Heckerling, and Savage Steve Holland contributed to.

In the midst of the usual superpowered action and angst, there are a lot of laughs about the culture of high school, as seen from the student perspective. Adults are either petty tyrants or ineffectual scolds (even Captain America). High-school rituals like the morning news bulletin, homecoming dance, and academic decathlon are both laughable and life-or-death important. Everyone else seems to be having more fun.

In many ways, the high school in Spider-Man: Homecoming is a welcome update to the schools in those earlier movies and in the original Spider-Man comics. Peter Parker attends a high school devoted to science and technology, so by older standards everyone’s already a nerd. His rival Flash Thompson isn’t the football captain; he just has a big mouth and sharp tongue. And the student body is very ethnically diverse.

Spider-Man: Homecoming doesn’t seem shy about its cinematic pedigree. The movie even includes a clip from Hughes’s Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, an iconic example of the genre. The soundtrack features the Ramones, the English Beat, and A Flock of Seagulls. The homecoming dance has an ’80s theme, which would be exotic for characters born in this century but is nostalgic for some of this movie’s target audience.

My friend Dan Mazur has said that he used to enjoy Spider-Man comics and their common theme of “With great power there must also come—great responsibility!” But eventually he noticed that almost every story came back to “With great power there must also come—great responsibility!” And he began to think that comics should find more to say. [More on that here.]

That’s not the theme of this Spider-Man movie, however. It’s not an origin story, as in Amazing Fantasy, #15. We don’t see Peter Parker bit by the spider, we don’t see him try pro wrestling, we don’t see him ignore the burglar who kills his uncle. At no point does he really think about tossing everything away or just showing off, as Peter has occasionally done in the comics and previous movies.

Instead, when Spider-Man: Homecoming starts, Peter is already determined to take on great responsibilities as a costumed crimefighter. Indeed, he’s too eager. The major moment of character growth is actually stepping away from big, flashy responsibilities in favor of staying home. The Homecoming subtitle refers to how the story immediately follows from Captain America: Civil War, the high school dance, and Peter’s decision to focus on his own neighborhood.

The main theme of this Spider-Man is thus the same as those earlier high-school movies: stay true to yourself and your real friends, and you’ll get through this.

Indomitable

Last weekend the New York Times Book Review ran an interview with Malala Yousafzai, the Afghan teenager attacked by Taliban gunsels because she continued to attend school. Her answers included this surprise:

Were there particular books that helped you get through the recovery process after the attack on you by the Taliban?

“The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” was the first book I read in the hospital. I had been having headaches and couldn’t read or focus properly for a while. It is a lovely book, and it was given to me by [Prime Minister] Gordon Brown — he sent me 25 books, and this was my favorite.

I like to think that the simplicity of that book’s storytelling, and its indomitable heroine, were what Yousafzai needed at that time.

J. A. Jance and the Oz Books

I’ve been hearing about the mystery writer J. A. Jance’s appearance at the Moravian Bookshop in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, so I decided to highlight how she became a writer.

She’s told this story in many brief ways, but this essay for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer seems to have the most detail:

I ended up in Mrs. Spangler’s [second-grade] class, and that, too, was a life-changing event. On a shelf under the window, Mrs. Spangler had a collection of books. If we finished our work early, we were allowed to go to the bookshelf and choose a book. I always finished my work early, and that’s where I discovered The Wizard of Oz–not the movie, but the book by Frank Baum. And not just that one book, either, the whole series, all of them. For me, it was love at first sight.

Some kids encountering The Wizard of Oz focus on the Wizard himself, the funny little guy hiding behind his green curtain. What I saw was Frank Baum hiding behind the words, and as soon as I realized someone had put those words on paper, that’s who I wanted to be and what I wanted to do. I wanted to write books; tell stories; put words on paper.

In another interview, Jance also highlighted John D. McDonald’s Travis McGee thrillers: “That was when I realized it was possible to write series books for grown-ups. There were of course other authors who wrote series books for grown-ups, but that was one that was readily accessible for me.”

I was struck by how the card page (i.e., the “Other Books by This Author” page) in Jance’s latest books, listing two hefty mystery series and a bunch of other titles, has the same sense of promise as the long list printed in some Oz books.

What Do Those Challenges to The Giver Mean?

Slate just ran Ben Blatt’s article with the incendiary headline “The Giver Banned” and the more temperate subtitle “Why Do So Many Parents Try to Remove Lois Lowry’s Book?”

Blatt wrote:

Since its release in 1993, The Giver has been one of the most controversial books in American schools. Between 1990 and 1999, The Giver ranked 11th on the list of the books most frequently requested for removal. In the 2000s it was 23rd, just two spots below To Kill a Mockingbird. This Friday marks the release of the first film adaptation of The Giver, which is likely to renew fandom, as well as opposition, to the dystopian young adult novel.

That analysis is lacking several crucial variables:

• just how many schools and school libraries have The Giver as a standard title. The more schools use a book, especially as assigned reading for a whole class, the more likely it is to prompt challenges, but the rate of those challenges could still be much lower than for other titles.
• how much difference there is between the top of the list and 23rd.

The article states that, in contrast to most other controversial titles, and especially the most challenged, “The most frequently cited reasons to challenge The Giver have been ‘Violence’ and claims that the book is ‘Unsuited to [the] Age Group’—or in other words that it’s too dark for children.” That point is accompanied by a chart showing how types of challenges to The Giver compared to the ALA’s total database. But the chart offers no “n value”—no statement of how many challenges were counted.

And that complaint brings up another missing variable: what grades the complaints were coming from. To a parent “Unsuited to Age Group” doesn’t mean too dark for all children but too dark for the particular children assigned to read it.

And let’s face it, The Giver is a dark book, regardless of what age its readers are. That’s kind of the point.

Black and Blue?

The May/June Yale magazine considers who the university’s first African-American graduate was. The usual names are Richard Henry Green, MD 1857; Courtlandt Van Rensselaer Creed, MD 1857; and Edward Bouchet, 1874, PhD 1876. They were recognized as having black ancestry and (at least at times) classified as black in the racial categories of their time.

But what, Mark Alden Branch asks, about Moses Simons, 1809, already identified as Yale’s first Jewish graduate?

…evidence uncovered recently by two scholars—Adam Wolkoff of Rutgers and Laura Copland of Eugene Lang College—suggests that Simons could have had an African American mother, and that he was viewed by others as “colored,” in the parlance of the time.

Simons came from South Carolina, apparently the son of one of five Jewish brothers who emigrated there from London. Records are not clear as to which of the brothers was his father, and no record of his mother has been found. At least one of the brothers is known to have fathered a mixed-race child.

Simons became a lawyer in New York City. The only hints that he had African American ancestry come from an account of a criminal trial in 1818 after Simons was charged with assault. As told by a lawyer and journalist named Daniel Rogers in a contemporary legal periodical, Simons and his brother were asked to leave a dance because other patrons were uncomfortable with the presence of the “two coloured men.”

And the story of Randall Lee Gibson, 1853, reminds us that the whole question of racial classification is based on a series of fictions.

Gibson…grew up on a sugar plantation in Louisiana, the descendant of a family of wealthy planters and slave owners. He was a colonel in the Confederate army, fought to defend slavery, and called black people “the most degraded of all the races of men.” He became a US senator from Louisiana after Reconstruction.

But as Vanderbilt law professor Daniel Sharfstein ’00JD details in his book The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White, Gibson’s great-grandfather Gideon Gibson came to South Carolina in the 1730s as a “free man of color” with a white wife. By Randall Gibson’s time, the family explained any dark complexion in the family as due to Gypsy or Portuguese roots, Sharfstein says.

Both these Yale men had family roots in South Carolina, which had a fairly cosmopolitan port at Charleston, at times a legally “black” majority, and a racial code that differed from the Virginia laws that have been so studied.

A Thoroughly Modern Debate

The theater program at my old high school has been making news—indeed, prominent news in the Boston Globe—with a production of Thoroughly Modern Millie.

As the show was in preparation and then nearing its premiere, Asian-American parents and teachers complained that it would present old-fashioned stereotypes of Chinese immigrants into the U.S.

Which it does. When I saw this musical at the Kennedy Center in Washington a few years back, I was surprised by how much the story relied on hoary ideas of the threat of “white slavery” and Chinese laundries.

Of course, Thoroughly Modern Millie was always a deliberately old-fashioned tale, its title ironic from the start. It began as a 1967 movie spoofing the 1920s. The 2002 stage adaptation was an even broader spoof on the 1920s—including the racial attitudes of that time.

The show was developed in years when much of American pop culture was supposed to be ingested ironically. The team adapting the movie into a 21st-century stage show seems to have tried to make clear that they were portraying those bigoted notions of the 1920s only to laugh at them. Or at least audiences could come away telling themselves that.

One of the second act’s laughs comes from the audience’s recognition that “Muqin,” a song the Chinese laundry workers are singing about their mother, has the same tune as “My Mammy.” (My grandmother loved that moment because she finally recognized something.) Does that moment convey the realization that all people are the same at heart? Or that it’s funny to hear Chinese syllables in place of English? The show seemed to both ride on ethnic humor and assure us that we all know better now.

Some of the stage show creators’ thoroughly modern tweaks can’t be discussed without giving away details of their ending. Most notably, ***SPOILER*** one of the laundry workers ends up rescuing the second female lead and thus becoming the second male lead—a significant figure in the American musical comedy form. That was a change from the 1963 movie, not to mention from 1920s America. (New York never had “anti-miscegenation” laws, but many people there would still have frowned on such an “interracial” relationship, and the young woman could have lost her US citizenship.)

Presenting a stereotypical characterization for a extended stretch, only to reveal hidden depths, is a risky dramatic ploy. Back here I described how the producers of the Young Justice TV show did it with the character of Miss Martian, prompting internet rants about her silly female behavior before the show revealed just why she was conforming to that stereotype. It was impossible for the producers to respond to those complaints without giving away an important moment of the story they’d crafted and thus an important comment on adolescent behavior. Such examples raise the question of just how much of a work of art we have to take in before passing judgment on it.

In this case, I did see the modern Thoroughly Modern Millie without knowing what to expect, and I did find it problematic. Despite its many roles for dancing girls (always a plus in youth theater), it’s surprising to see the show getting so many school productions.

Disability Studies and the Wizard of Oz

The Sentinel of Shippensburg, Pennsylvania, reports that Joshua R. Eyler, director of the Center for Teaching Excellence at Rice University, will deliver a presentation on “If I Only Had a Brain: Disability and Difference in the Oz Narratives,” on Thursday, 6 March, at Shippensburg University.

The paper explains:

Eyler’s talk will examine Baum’s fiction about the land of Oz and the literary and cinematic legacies of this Oz mythology, using the lens of disability studies. Although disability is not the first thing that comes to mind when reading the Oz narratives, disability unquestionably and powerfully appears as a thematic current running throughout the tradition. The talk will explore how each text within the tradition picks up the theme anew to construct its own particular meaning.

Eyler has been working on this topic since at least 2007, when he and colleague Gretchen Nevins presented a talk at Columbus State University titled “Figuring Disability in L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.” Last fall the Children’s Literature Association Quarterly published Eyler’s article “Disability and Prosthesis in L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.” He’s stated that reading about characters searching for a brain, a heart, and courage can “help the story’s young readers learn difficult lessons about empathy” and that “the book works very well as a way to introduce many ideas about disability and society to young readers.“

Eyler’s talk will begin at 7:00 in the Old Main Chapel at Shippensburg University. It’s free and open to the public.

Non-Fiction over Novels in Schools?

Natasha Vargas-Cooper’s essay “Why We Should Stop Teaching Novels to High School Students” at BookForum starts like this:

It wasn’t until my second reading of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, over a decade after it first had been assigned to me by my public high school English teacher, that I understood that Jake’s dick didn’t work. The word “impotence” never shows up in the book, and in my teenage mind it didn’t pose a huge problem between him and Lady Brett. Couldn’t they just dry hump as everyone else in the tenth grade did? Abstract notions of emasculation—how that related to bullfighting, trench warfare, loss, diminution, dying—did not even occur to me.

That particular novel seems like an odd choice for high-schoolers, not just because of its sexual import but also because it’s about disillusioned adults approaching middle age. I know reading is supposed to broaden a person, but developmentally teens have their own concerns to deal with.

Vargas-Cooper’s solution for such disconnects is for high-school classes to teach more nonfiction. However, that nonfiction could be just as foreign to teenagers’ concerns.

In fact, I recall reading a wide range of literature in high-school English: not just novels and plays and some poetry but also John McPhee and Joan Didion and other essayists. I don’t know how my high school in the 1980s compares to Vargas-Cooper’s, but from what I read today, I’m more concerned that today’s English classes are all about writing the five-paragraph essay demanded by tests instead of either good fiction or nonfiction.

The Problem of Resentful Reading

Fifth-grade teacher Pernille Ripp in School Library Journal on “Why Reading Sucks: Talking honestly with kids might make them more passionate readers”:

On posterboard, I wrote the heading, “Why Reading Sucks,” and asked the kids to name their own reasons for why this might be the case. At first, the children darted glances at one another, not quite sure where this crazy teacher was headed. Then one student finally blurted out, “I don’t think a teacher has ever asked me that!” . . .

When we looked over the list we had created together, I agreed that these were valid reasons, indeed, why reading may not be the most favorite thing to do for a child or even many adults. Some children hate sitting still; others find reading boring, time consuming, or restrictive. They resent that they are forced to read certain books or at a certain time. They feel pressured, and some believe that they are bad readers. What it all adds up to is a miserable reading experience, and that is what we have to fight.

I thanked the kids for their honesty, and then asked them for their solutions. One after another my students raised their hands. “Can we pick our own books?” “Yes,” I replied. “Do we have to read a certain amount of minutes and log it?” “No,” I said. “I expect you to read every night and you only log it in [class].” “Do we have to finish every book we start?” “No,” I assured them.

Ripp originally wrote this piece for her blog in September. She also offers a survey asking kids how they are as readers.

The day after the SLJ site published Ripp’s essay, she had a baby.

Not in Florida Anymore

Here’s a striking video of The Wizard of Oz, largely based on the MGM movie, from a Florida state school. The troupe is called Eyes Alive!, and all the young actors are deaf, performing in American Sign Language.

The school’s blog explains:

Jessica Stultz, a deaf elementary teacher, founded the performing arts group in 2010. “With many deaf films rolling out within the past decade by ASL Films, Rustic Lantern and others, I felt creating ASL films by our young students was a great way we could share old classics in the language of the deaf.” She added, “Having our young students perform in these films helps build their ASL acting and storytelling skills – they also learned nonverbal and facial expression skills. This increases their self-confidence and they also learn to collaborate with others.” . . .

In the fall of 2011, the Eyes Alive! group decided their next project would be “The Wizard of Oz.” After writing the 25-page script, they quickly realized that the production would be better if it were made into a movie instead of being performed live on stage. Jessica Stultz contacted Michael Johnson, FSDB video production specialist, to see if he would help produce the film. Mr. Johnson has a degree in Film and Television Production from Full Sail University in Orlando, FL and spent a couple of years in Los Angeles working on multiple motion pictures, television shows, and commercials.

With his help, photography started in early 2012 and filming was completed by the end of April. On June 5, 2012, “The Wizard of Oz” was performed live for elementary students and their families in Kirk Auditorium.

Clearly all the kids worked hard on the project, and some are quite expressive actors.

Daniel Pucca’s Mini, and Adolescent Memories

Yesterday I discussed Daniel Pucca’s mini-comic My Dutch Foreskin, focusing on the lettering. Because that’s the first thing you think of when you read that title, right?

Pucca was an American in a Dutch intermediate school when word came down that the health exam would require boys to roll back their foreskins. He didn’t know what that meant. (The comic establishes that at that moment Daniel was living with his grandmother, so he didn’t have anyone he felt comfortable asking.) When he found out, he thought something was terribly wrong with him.

Like Pucca, I was born in the period when almost all American boys were circumcised soon after birth. So was my father. I don’t think I saw an uncircumcised penis until I was in junior high, when gym class included showers with a single classmate, a newcomer from Australia, who still had a foreskin. He was thus in the opposite position from young Daniel in Holland. I didn’t know that fellow well, so I have no idea of how his experiences mirrored Daniel’s, but that memory helped me appreciate My Dutch Foreskin.

A few years further on, I recall another immigrant classmate—a nice guy from Russia—feeling acutely embarrassed on a high-school trip to Montreal when he had only a tiny European-style men’s bathing suit while the rest of us boys were in baggy American trunks. (Mind you, the baggy shorts of the 1980s were nothing compared to the voluminous fashions of more recent decades.)

I remember my immigrant classmate standing at the side of the Montreal Olympic pool in his snug swimsuit, asking if anyone had another suit to lend him. But of course we were all away from home, and in the pool besides. We kept telling him to just get in the water where none of the girls could see clearly. But of course the only cure for adolescent self-consciousness is time.

Me and the Massachusetts Independent Comics Expo, 28-29 Sept.

This weekend brings the Massachusetts Independent Comics Expo in Cambridge’s Porter Square, a free show featuring independent and small-press comics from the region’s top creators.

See new mini-comics, original art, and fine graphic novels. Special events for the kids! Hands-on workshops!

And if that’s not enough to get you interested, I’ll be moderator for two panels.

Saturday, 11am to 12 noon
Educating with Comics
A conversation with artists who create comics that entertain and inform, on topics including anthropology, primatology, astronomy and zoology. What are the approaches and techniques that cartoonists use to translate fact into fun? Featuring:

• Maris Wicks
• Rosemary Mosco
• Kriota Willberg
• E.J. Barnes

Sunday, 2:30pm to 3:30pm
Reinterpretations of Classics
Comics provides infinite opportunities to adapt, re-vamp and update classic texts, for readers of all ages, from the reverent to the ridiculous. A panel of writer-artists and editors talk about their work in this area, including adapations of Shakespeare, fairy tales, myths and the great works of literature. Featuring:

• George O’Connor
• Chris Duffy
• Gareth Hinds
• R. Sikoryak

In addition, I’ll be the volunteer designated to help out at this panel, to be moderated by Brigid Alverson (which is my way of making sure I won’t miss it).

Sunday, 11:30am to 12:30pm
Why YA Comics?
The challenge of creating graphic novels for teens and tweens is finding an authentic voice—one that comes from within rather than above. How have independent creators managed to connect with teens at their own level? What sorts of stories resonate with then? And can anyone over 20 really be trusted? Featuring:

• Robin Brenner
• Mike Cavallaro
• Nick Abadsiz

How could you plan to be anywhere else?

Rep. Kerry Bentivolio’s Plan to Avoid Being a Laughingstock

Rep. Kerry Bentivolio of Michigan provided this week’s example of OIP Derangement Syndrome. As quoted by Buzzfeed and elsewhere, Bentivolio responded to a question about presidential impeachment at a Birmingham Bloomfield Republican Club meeting by saying:

If I could write that bill and submit it, it would be a dream come true. I feel your pain and I know. I stood twelve feet away from the guy and listened to him. I couldn’t stand being there, but because he is president I have to respect the office. . . .

I went back to my office and I’ve had lawyers come in. These are lawyers, PhDs in history, and I said, “Tell me how I can impeach the president of the United States.”

Until we have evidence, you’re going to become a laughingstock if you’ve submitted the bill to impeach the president…

OIP Derangement Syndrome usually begins with a visceral feeling of dislike about seeing Barack Obama as President. That feeling is clear in the way Bentivolio emphasizes “pain,” how he “stood 12 feet away from the guy” and “couldn’t stand being there.” Physical proximity is not a factor in rationally disagreeing with someone else’s political ideas.

Many people with OIP Derangement Syndrome seek out an acceptable reason for that visceral feeling, an excuse to tell themselves and others. Bentivolio’s dislike is so strong that he dreams of writing a bill to impeach the President, which would suggest that he needs to find very strong reasons.

But the representative is still working on that last part. He’s ready to unseat a twice-elected President, but he doesn’t have “evidence.” For rational people, collecting evidence precedes making an important decision. For Bentivolio and others with OIP Derangement Syndrome, the desired conclusion comes first, then the attempt to justify it.

As a member of Congress, Bentivolio is actually a fluke. The Republican who represented that district in Michigan botched his reelection in 2012, leaving Bentivolio as the only party candidate on the ballot. He started as a “Tea Party” candidate trying to keep the congressman from moving to the left and ended up as congressman himself.

It’s unclear when Bentivolio started to develop his current political drive. According to Human Events, he was “a local volunteer in Republican campaigns going back to Ronald Reagan in 1980.” Yet the story he told National Review put more weight on a running into Tea Party protesters:

One weekend, as he drove around in a rented car, he noticed a group of what appeared to be Revolutionary War reenactors. Intrigued, he pulled over.

“People told me they were the Tea Party, and I said, ‘You’re supposed to be in Boston!’” he says with a laugh. “And I said, ‘Well, what do you mean by that?’ ‘It stands for Taxed Enough Already.’ I said, ‘Well that’s a good idea!’”

Such Tea Party demonstrations were a 2009 reaction to the election of President Barack Obama.

Bentivolio was, among other things, a schoolteacher, and by the 2011-12 year he had developed a bad reputation for talking “constantly in class about political stuff,” as reported in the Detroit Free Press.

But he also acted in a friend’s amateur movie called The President Goes to Heaven, released in 2011, about a Bush-like President faking an attack on New York skyscrapers. And there was an odd moment in his campaign when he and his brother traded accusations of mental instability. So we may well see more news from Rep. Bentivolio, once he concludes his important campaign against traffic cameras in the District of Columbia.

Looking Back on Follow My Leader

Tami Lewis Brown at From the Mixed-Up Files interviewed Candlewick editor Kaylan Adair, and one passage rang a familiar chord for me:

I struggled with reading for much of my early life but in fourth or fifth grade, my (incredibly patient) school librarian convinced me to give the novel Follow My Leader a try. The book struck me as being intimidatingly long, but it was about a boy who’s blinded in an accident and gets a guide dog and I was obsessed with dogs at the time (particularly German shepherds), so I decided to give it a try. It’s the first middle-grade novel I remember reading for pleasure. And it’s no exaggeration to say that that experience changed my life.

I read that book, too, though it was in seventh grade and I was already an avid reader. My English teacher for the first half of that year, David Ticchi, was blind. He could hear any whisper in class and smell gum in any corner. He was also a weightlifter. No one messed with Mr. Ticchi.

I was curious about Mr. Ticchi’s experiences, so when I saw Follow My Leader by James B. Garfield in a library I picked it up. Of course, I picked up nearly every book back then. I think I read The Great Gatsby later the same year.

Garfield’s young protagonist, the equally presidentially named Jimmy Carter, loses his sight in a fireworks accident as a young teen. He learns new skills and bonds with a seeing-eye dog. Mr. Ticchi had very limited vision from birth and used a cane but not, as I recall, a dog. But details in the book about learning Braille, handling money, and other tasks stuck with me because I figured that’s how he did things, too. Those passages were certainly easier for a seventh-grader to understand then than The Great Gatsby.

Mr. Ticchi had someone read our essays and stories out loud to him at home. That was when I started typing my longer homework since I figured it would be easier on the reader (even though I used to have very good handwriting). As a result, I never learned to touch-type the normal way; by the time my high school offered that class, I had already developed bad but very fast habits.

Halfway through the school year, Mr. Ticchi left to evangelize for Ray Kurzweil’s reading machine—an early OCR and text-to-voice computer. Eventually he returned to the school system, but our paths didn’t intersect again. I never forgot him, though.

The NRA’s OIP Derangement Syndrome

This week the organization that claims to speak for America’s gun fandom, the National Rifle Association, released an online ad calling President Barack Obama an “elitist hypocrite” because of his daughters’ school. As the Washington Post’s Fact Checker column reported, the NRA’s ad was false in multiple ways:

• It claimed that President Obama opposed having guards in schools. In fact, he supports that idea but doubts, like the overwhelming majority of Americans, that it’s a complete solution.
• The ad claimed that the “school Obama’s daughters attend has 11 armed guards.” It has a small security staff (eleven people over two campuses), but as a Quaker institution does not arm them.

The NRA managed thus to be doubly wrong on facts and disrespectful of religious principles.

Furthermore, when called on the ad, An NRA spokesperson claimed, “If anyone thinks we’re talking specifically about someone’s children, they’re missing the point completely. This isn’t an issue about comparing the president’s kids.” Except that the ad said, “Are the president’s kids more important than yours?” Of course that’s “comparing the president’s kids”! How stupid does the organization think its audience is?

The Post awarded the NRA’s effort four Pinnochios out of four, the rating it reserves for “whoppers.”

Shortly afterward, gun fans on talk radio, FOX News, and elsewhere then worked themselves into a dudgeon over the fact that some children who had written to President Obama about gun violence were part of his announcement of how the administration will address that problem. How dare he use children as political props? those commenters demanded, though not all in such polite terms.

Never mind that the NRA had just tried to use President Obama’s two daughters. And never mind that those same commenters made no such squawks about President George W. Bush having children all around him when he announced his policy on funding medical research using stem cells.

And when he signed his education bill.

Patently false statements about this President? Applying double standards to his behavior? Intimations that the Obama family is getting above their station? Those are the hallmarks of OIP Derangement Syndrome.

In this case, the right wing’s usual resentment is probably aggravated by some underlying guilt. The national debate over gun safety was invigorated by the horrific massacre in the Sandy Hook Elementary School. The NRA and its allies are desperate to separate children from the debate over gun rights and responsibilities because of the inability to separate children from actual guns.

More Derangement from America’s Political Right

Lest we think that derangement on the political right is limited to when some people think about President Obama, the National Review published this essay by Charlotte Allen on the Newtown school shooting last week:

There was not a single adult male on the school premises when the shooting occurred. In this school of 450 students, a sizeable number of whom were undoubtedly 11- and 12-year-old boys (it was a K–6 school), all the personnel — the teachers, the principal, the assistant principal, the school psychologist, the “reading specialist” — were female. There didn’t even seem to be a male janitor to heave his bucket at Adam Lanza’s knees. Women and small children are sitting ducks for mass-murderers.

Many news reports and pre-shooting websites state that Sandy Hook Elementary School served kindergarten through grade four. It was not “a K-6 school,” and it had no “11- and 12-year-old boys.”

Furthermore, news outlets like NBC reported this account:

A custodian warned of the gunman by running through the halls, said 4th-grade teacher Theodore Varga.

"He said, 'Guys! Get down! Hide!'" Varga said. "So he was actually a hero."

Thus, in direct contradiction to the basis of Allen’s essay, there were at least two men in the school.

Allen was obviously so convinced of the correctness of her beliefs and so lazy that she didn’t bother to do basic research. The National Review’s editors were so equally convinced and lazy and didn’t bother to do basic fact-checking.

But it gets worse. Allen’s suggestion for how to stop Adam Lanza, armed with a semi-automatic rifle, two pistols, and hundreds of rounds of ammunition, was:

Male aggression can be a good thing, as in protecting the weak — but it has been forced out of the culture of elementary schools and the education schools that train their personnel. Think of what Sandy Hook might have been like if a couple of male teachers who had played high-school football, or even some of the huskier 12-year-old boys, had converged on Lanza.

Charlotte Allen thus blamed feminism for the death toll and wished that those entirely imaginary “huskier 12-year-old boys” had charged straight at the gunman. Apparently the alternative possibilities—spending more money on mental-health treatment or restricting people’s freedom to buy military weaponry—are so anathema to her that her mind goes into fantasy mode.

One more detail: At the bottom of her essay, the National Review identified Charlotte Allen as author of The Human Christ. Yes, this author who wished twelve-year-olds had been around to attack a man with a semi-automatic rifle also styled herself an expert on Christian thinking.