I love the hairdos on the Mommy Seed packets. Now you can grow your own blue-haired mommy. You can even plant gray helmet hair. This next one looks like Donna Reed Show 1958 tv hair.
Cultivating real mommies is trickier than drawing mommy hair. Those thoughts will be in a future blog. Best wishes this Mother's Day weekend to all mommies and gardeners!
© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder
This cabbage butterfly flits about the broccoli leaves in her layered chiffon dance costume looking ever so much like one of Dracula's undead wives in the recent Texas Ballet Theater production at Bass Hall in Fort Worth. So delicate, beautiful, and evil, and ready to suck the life out of our spring garden. Fiendish...
Sitting in the box at the Bass, I turned around and whacked the nearly-snoring males of our party on their knees with my rolled-up program. Wake up, you village oafs, youths, and innkeepers! The undead wives are flying!!! D'that ever happen at your crypt?
"Flying by Foy," I learn, is the industry standard for theatrical flight rigging. That Peter Pan television special starring Mary Martin and Cyril Richard that I loved far more than brussel sprouts back in the 1950s was managed by Peter Foy.
Judanna Lynn's costume designs were perfect. Dracula's gorgeous batwing cape alone was worth the drive to Ft. Worth. I wish I knew more about the process of inspiration, research, design, and construction for it. The velvet and brocade costume weighs thirty pounds, and has a fifteen foot wingspan! The details are as luscious at the images of moths in Joseph Scheer's Night Visions, and as powerful as an evening at Austin's Congress Avenue bridge!
© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder
Set up twenty-seven worm bins today. One was real, and the rest were a pretend play art project for the preschoolers. Our class started a worm bin in January. This art project let kids review what we have learned about worms so far, and practice the vocabulary for fine motor manipulations and spatial relationships.
I seem to buy a package of mushrooms nearly every week, so I had lots of blue styrofoam packages resembling the class Rubbermaid storage container worm bin.
The most difficult part of this day was getting the kids to stand up and push their chairs in before picking up their worm bins. I wonder how Miss Nancy on Romper Room got the children to do it so well. Maybe after worm art it will be time for Do-Bees.
It's so nice to know somebody wants me for their Valentine. Unfortunately, it is Collin County. Yes, McKinney is beckoning me to spoon and swoon beneath the moon with an outlaw beau. I'm thinking our county seat must be a porch swing.
Roy, Dale, and Trigger are there on the lacy paper doily perimeter singing, "Happy trials to you, Until we meet again. Happy trials to you, Keep smilin' until then." Next Valentines Day I hope Collin County just sends roses!
© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder
You might be a pre-K teacher if you tell your coworker you need to ruh-ruh-run to the ruh-ruh-restroom. It's been a busy week in the wacky world of initial word sounds and beginning readers. I think I might have "Sounding-Out Syndrome" or phonicositis.
Not feeling puh-particularly puh-pleased with the painted paper plates for our peacock art project, I felt the need for pretty patterned paper pieces to create royal palace gardens. The students began puh-puh-puhhing along with me. Soon they were drawing a prince and princess on the path from the palace to peer at the peacock. They drew in other peafowl, pear trees, and a pond. Pretty soon we had petunias, pines, palm trees in the garden, and piranhas in the pond.
Wait, wait! Wuh-wuh-one of the things that snags the students is the difference between a letter's name and the sound that letter makes. That's wuh-why a child brings me a W card and says, "duh-duh-duh-double U, wristwatch". Another child brings the F card, and says, "eh-eh-ehfuh, fish", while pointing to a picture of an eh-eh-elephant.
One of my dad's classic tales of a one-room country schoolhouse involves a spelling bee. You know the rhythm and routine of a spelling bee. Say the word. Spell it. Say the word again.
So a nervous country kid steps up to the front of the classroom, stands by the blackboard, and says,
"Fish. B-O-X. Fish."
Sometimes the teacher chuckles and makes herself a note. Other times, she just wants to put her head down on the table right there in all the graham cuh-cracker cuh-crumbs.
I enjoy Tom Bodett on the quiz show panel for NPR's "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me!" This particular peacock picture seems to be leaving the palace nightlight on for him.
Ehfuh-fuh-fuh-fuh can't help but lead to Funiculi, funicula. This was the theme song for the local weekend children's talent show broadcast on black and white KOLN/KGIN tv. Harken, harken, listen to our song! We'll save Annette fuh-fuh-Funicello for another day.
© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder
Annette Funicello & Audrey Meadows.
Lt. Cmdr. Data? & Kerwin Mathews?
Found this folder of paper dolls on my last trip to Nebraska. Just pretend that the yellowed Scotch tape reinforcements are Ace bandages. As a kid, I thought the female dancers resembled Mouseketeer Annette and Jackie Gleason's wife on The Honeymooners. The male dancers seemed devoid of identity. Perhaps they were androids.
© 2007 Nancy L. Ruder
What's In My Lunch? is the new lunchroom gameshow. It was invented as a distraction for a preschooler having a major tantrum wanting to go home to mommy, and to not stay for lunch and a nap. I really, really, really didn't want the student to set off all the other young ones in a mass lunchtime tantrum. Even more, I didn't want the sobbing tantrum to escalate to the point of gagging, which is always an unpleasant possibility that is hard on my appetite and usually on my shoes.
Distraction is one of the greatest tools for managing small children. One hot summer day in 1982 I was beached like a huge pregnant perspiring inflatable manatee in a webbed folding lawn chair at Benson Park in Omaha for my mother-in-law's family reunion. Some competent and very distant relation was watching her two toddlers play nearby. The reality of impending motherhood was weighing very heavily on my mind and body, so I asked this related stranger about her secret to parenting. She answered, "Distraction and substitution." What other wisdom could she impart to my stewed aquatic mammal brain? This wise woman, this young part-time dental hygienist and mother I hadn't met before nor since, said, "Controlled choices."
I revere this elusive messiah who handed down the way I could keep my head attached to my body while parenting young boys. It helps me understand the John Frum cargo cult on the South Pacific island of Vanatu.
Controlled choices--Offer the child two choices, each of which are acceptable to the adult. Do you want to wear your striped shirt or your Ghostbuster jumpsuit? Do you want to select a yogurt flavor or a fresh fruit at the grocery store? Would you like to listen to the baseball game on the radio or have the "Little Mermaid" cassette playing while you go to sleep?
For my little students I ask if they would prefer to be a game contestant or to start eating their sandwiches. I usually pack a salad for lunch, and put in every possible item. That gives the contestants more chances to guess right or wrong. Today my salad had lettuce, carrots, almonds, sunflower seeds, tomato, celery, snow peas, red and orange pepper, mushrooms, cheese, ham, avocado, crumbled blue corn chips, and dressing. I usually make a yogurt dressing because many of the kids have yogurt in their own lunches. The more things to guess in my lunch, the more foods they add to their mental bank of acceptable edibles. The more guessing, the more distraction for the sobbing student. The lunch gameshow is a more appealing choice than crying until you barf on your Lunchable.
Back in the deep, dark, gray, black, and white cavern of 1950s television, I got "To Tell the Truth" mildly entwangled with "What's My Line?" Kitty Carlisle died April 19th at the age of ninety-six. She was a panelist on "To Tell the Truth" along with Polly Bergen, Johnny Carson, Bill Cullen, and Don Ameche. The show, hosted by Bud Collyer, had three contestants all claiming to be the same person. The panel asked questions to determine which contestant was telling the truth.
"What's My Line?," was hosted by John Daly. The panelists included Dorothy Kilgallen, Bennett Cerf, Arlene Francis, Steve Allen, Fred Allen, Ernie Kovacs, and Louis Untermeyer. Sometimes the panelistS had to don blindfolds. The object of the game was for four panelists to try to guess unusual occupations of contestants or a product associated with them.
To tell the truth, I'm losing weight on this nutritious role model diet.
© 2007 Nancy L. Ruder
Thanks so much to the Dallas Opera for acknowledging the classic 1950 Chuck Jones Warner Brothers short, "The Rabbit of Seville", in the current volume of its online newsletter. With apologies to Robert Fulghum, all I ever knew about opera I learned from Looney Tunes, at least until recent years. How fun to see Bugs and Elmer Fudd with just one click!
My favorite part of the cartoon is Bugs using his toes during Fudd's scalp massage. How did Ben Washam figure out Bug's presto digital foot movements? I'd have as much luck figuring out how to do Michael Jackson's Moon Walk!
My copy of The Just So Stories is missing in action. I have so many stacks of stuff at home and at work, and it's just got to be here somewhere. Rudyard could probably explain that CollageMama "humphed" instead of filing and putting things away ever since the work began, and she will just have to deal with it. And wouldn't Rudyard be a good name for a junkyard dog?
I am one of the world's luckiest inhabitants. My mother rocked me in the yellow Eames rocking chair when I was tiny, and read Kipling to me in the mornings after Captain Kangaroo and the Arthur Godfrey Show ended. Arthur Godfrey had a ukelele, and the Captain had Mr. Moose, Bunny Rabbit, the ping-pong balls, Mr. Green Jeans, the Banana Man, the Magic Drawing Board, Bainter the Painter, Dancing Bear, and stories. Oh, what wonderful, gentle stories! Caps for Sale, The Littlest Snowman With the Red Candy Heart, Ping, Make Way for Ducklings, Millions of Cats, Stone Soup, Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel!
I put together a whole curriculum for a summer art/drama camp about Australia because the Captain used to sing "Waltzing Matilda" forty years ago. I still wish a jolly swagman would sit beside my billibong and eat marzi doats and doesi doats. Some of my strangest nightmares may have origins in the Magic Drawing Board's version of "There's a Hole in the Bottom of the Sea." Bob Keeshan was the genius that defined my childhood, even more than Dick, Jane, and Sally. I even saw Captain Kangaroo IN CONCERT! Yes, at Lincoln's Pershing Auditorium. It was a totally big girl event. A babysitter was engaged to deal with my brother and baby sister. I'm nearly fifty, and I've never felt more grown-up than going to that event.
When a story begins, "O, Best Beloved," you know you will be traveling in a special jungle. It is the same as, "Once upon a time," but without the shining armor. I am sad when people reduce the Kipling experience to the thumbnail plot outline. Kipling is all about language; words, wonderful words, swirling in dust storms across the outback or wallowing in the great grey-green Limpopo River, more patterned than a bicolored python rock snake, and absolutely feeding my "satiable curiotity".
"O, Best Beloved," the stories would begin, and my mom and I still call each other Best Beloved (pronounced Bee-luv-Ed). Did I obsess that I would be spanked by adults as the Elephant's Child was spanked by his aunts and uncles because of his endless questions? Of course not. Did I go out and paint myself with fingertips dipped in mud like the leopard? Well, only that one time, and I'm almost over feeling guilty.
