Wise Up
Children
By David Bruce
July 14, 2008
• Kimya Dawson became famous after some of her songs appeared in the hit 2007 movie “Juno.” After the movie made her famous, she started creating an album titled “Alphabutt” for children. Her humor, as shown when she was a member of the anti-folk duo The Moldy Peaches with Adam Green, can be crude and involve bad language. She thinks that all of her albums are “child-appropriate, but not all parents agree — a lot of kids who like my stuff say, ‘I wanted to take your CD to show and tell, but my teacher doesn’t like it when you say ‘f****** c***.’” For that reason, she felt obliged to make what she calls “a show-and-tell-friendly album.” In 2008, her daughter was 2 years old, and Ms. Dawson was thinking of starting a curfew-friendly tour: “I’ve been thinking about doing a tour called ‘The Nine O’ Clock Curfew Tour,’ where I don’t play any shows that end after nine. This staying up ’til 11 stuff is bull***t.”
• Some people are fortunate in that they know what they want to do at an early age. When she was six, lesbian comedian Liz Feldman saw a Purim play at her synagogue in which her 11-year-old sister played Queen Esther. After the show, Liz pointed to the stage and told her mother, “That’s what I want to do!” At age 10, she asked her parents for an agent for her birthday. Unfortunately, she got a 10-speed bicycle instead. At age 12, she started auditioning in Manhattan. At age 15, she answered an ad looking for children who wrote and performed their own stand-up material, so she wrote three minutes of material and got a role in a play about very young stand-up comedians. One of the jokes she wrote — which she now considers “so bad” and yet “so gay” — is this: “You know how some kids will get embarrassed when their moms will spit on a napkin to wipe the dirt off their face? My mom just licks my face.”
• Of course, kids will be kids, even when they are elite athletes. In Romania, Nadia Comaneci and some other gymnasts did not turn their lights out when they were supposed to — they waited until they heard Bela Karolyi, their coach, coming to check up on them, then turned out the lights. They didn’t fool Bela, however, and he told them, “Your light was on. You must not be sleepy. Maybe you need to get a bit more tired before you close your eyes.” He made them run for a while outside before he let them go to bed again. The next day the young gymnasts were very tired, and after that they turned out their lights when they were supposed to.
• As a youth, Edgar Allan Poe was quite a swimmer. When he was 15 years old, he swam six miles up the James River, against the current — a feat that he thought was the equivalent of swimming “20 miles in still water.” He also once saved a young friend named Thomas Ellis from drowning. This deed is not as good as it might seem at first, for Thomas explained that “having thrown me into the falls headlong, that I might strike out for myself, he presently found it necessary to come to my help or it would have been too late.”
• Bob Weber is the creator of the syndicated comic strip “Slylock Fox,” in which the main character solves mysteries by using his knowledge of science. Among the products associated with this comic strip is a set of Slylock Fox Brain Bogglers mystery cards that can be purchased at stores. When Mr. Weber’s daughter was a little girl, she memorized all the answers. He says, “When I go out to libraries or stores to promote the set and the strip, she shouts out the answers. I have to ‘shhh’ her every time!”
• Bette Midler’s daughter is a Chinese scholar who has attended Beijing University. Ms. Midler says that her daughter has “always loved the Asians.” For example, when she was 13, she wanted to go to Japan. Ms. Midler was touring a lot back then, so she brought her daughter with her to Japan. Sounds educational, right? Actually, her daughter hung out the window while they were driving around Tokyo, saying, “Ooh, he’s hot! Ooh, what a hottie!” Ms. Midler laughs and says, “She tricked us!”
• When he was a child, major-league baseball star Bobby Bonilla used to sleep with his baseball bat in his bed. Sometimes he would get up during the night and practice his swing. Javier, his little brother, was always careful when he got out of bed. He says about Bobby, “He almost hit me a couple of times.” Bobby even took his bat along when he visited a girlfriend, whose mother would put away a glass centerpiece just in case Bobby got a little careless with his bat.
• Rock goddesses have kids, too. Pat Benatar was a major 1980s rock star and continues to play today. Her songs such as “Heartbreaker” are on “Guitar Hero,” and lots of children — and adults — rock out to them, including her two daughters, Haley and Hana. Of course, kids can ask embarrassing questions, and Haley and Hana sometimes ask their mom this question about the Spandex pants she used to wear on stage: “How did you get into those pants?”
• When Beverly Cleary, the young people’s author of the Ramona books, was very young, her father taught her that the world is round, and he used an orange to demonstrate that you could walk around the world and end up where you started. Having learned that lesson, Beverly set off to walk around the world. Fortunately, her father caught up with her at the edge of their farm, and then he taught her how big the world is.
• Children’s book author Betsy Byars has published over 50 books, but even she has her failures — books that never get published. One night, Guy, her nearly 8-year-old son, had insomnia, and he asked to read one of her failures. Ms. Byars says, “He read for about three minutes… and fell fast asleep. It was a humbling moment.”
Comments
Please log in to post a comment.
