Back in Fourth or Fifth grade, I knew a kid named Billy who made the\u00c2\u00a0statement that the first time he saw The Wizard of Oz… I don’t quite\u00c2\u00a0recall, either he was rooting for the tornado to blow Dorthoy away or he\u00c2\u00a0was hoping she would never find her way back to Kansas again.\u00c2\u00a0 Something horrible, at any rate.<\/p>\n
It is an attitude that surely would have saddened the grade school\u00c2\u00a0teacher, likely ascribing this with some deep meaning with Saturday Morning\u00c2\u00a0cartoons and Summer blockbusters and video grains draining away flights of whimsy.\u00c2\u00a0 Dig\u00c2\u00a0slightly ashunder a few years prior, and if I may say how indifferent\u00c2\u00a0I was with any number of childhood fare — regularly shown videos at\u00c2\u00a0school, and I think it might be shocking if people were forced to recall\u00c2\u00a0the percentage of a grade schools’ school year a teacher shows their\u00c2\u00a0classroom.\u00c2\u00a0 Some of it I’d grant with some cultural or educational\u00c2\u00a0importance, but some of it not.\u00c2\u00a0 They crammed The Nutcracker Suite down our\u00c2\u00a0throats.\u00c2\u00a0 Or maybe better to say my throat.\u00c2\u00a0 I think I took a nice nap \u00c2\u00a0during the proceedings, until my reguarly scheduled speech therapy\u00c2\u00a0session brought me out of class.\u00c2\u00a0 The speech therapist asked what we were\u00c2\u00a0watching; I answered “Nutcracker Suite”; she nodded approvingly, saying “That’s a good one”.\u00c2\u00a0 This\u00c2\u00a0wasn’t a generation gap but it was something of a culture clash meted\u00c2\u00a0with the personality type that goes into working with children — this case: she has culture; I shun culture.<\/p>\n
I have every reason to believe my fourth grade teacher\u00c2\u00a0loved the book Roller Skates<\/em>, as well I believe she was probably\u00c2\u00a0disappointed by the class’s almost violent revulsion.\u00c2\u00a0 The one thing I will say\u00c2\u00a0about the book is I turned in an art project tied to it, one which a\u00c2\u00a0few years later my brother insisted I keep, but one which did not garner\u00c2\u00a0as much appreciation from my teacher and garnered comments just short\u00c2\u00a0of “Come see me after class” — I seemed to have channeled a crude\u00c2\u00a0hybrid of Gary Panter and Basil Wolverton.\u00c2\u00a0 I was getting snotty at that\u00c2\u00a0age.\u00c2\u00a0 Maybe the class could not appreciate and just did not want to place\u00c2\u00a0oursleves into the quaint depression-era child protaganists.\u00c2\u00a0 Maybe, by all rights, we should have — we would have been better people for doing so.\u00c2\u00a0 Years later — sometime during high school, in my presence — I happened to be there–\u00c2\u00a0a friend of my mother’s expressed her rememberance and love of Roller\u00c2\u00a0Skates in my presence.\u00c2\u00a0 I told her that we read it in fourth grade, and\u00c2\u00a0I didn’t much care for it.\u00c2\u00a0 Her response went along the line of “Yeah,\u00c2\u00a0it’s more of a girl’s book” — I opted not to mention that the most\u00c2\u00a0violent revulsion came from the girls in the class, moreso than the boys,\u00c2\u00a0thinking that might break her heart.<\/p>\n Other examples of both childhood classics and items deigned befitting a\u00c2\u00a0child’s imagination which fell short of either my or my peers’\u00c2\u00a0imaginations come to my mind.\u00c2\u00a0 Part of it is a fronting, a “Too cool for\u00c2\u00a0school”, but even this becomes ingrained to the cultural ethos to hold sway.\u00c2\u00a0 What strikes me is that if I were to watch The Nutcracker Suite or\u00c2\u00a0read Roller Skates, or certainly view or read The Wizard of Oz today, I have no\u00c2\u00a0doubt I would appreciate them — even if it’s possible I might not enjoy\u00c2\u00a0particular items.\u00c2\u00a0 What’s more, the view of childhood intrinsic in some of these\u00c2\u00a0things, and the longings they tap into, might also make more sense to me\u00c2\u00a0and have better viscareal appeal…<\/p>\n … Now that I am no longer a child.\u00c2\u00a0 And because I am no longer a child.\u00c2\u00a0 Figure that logic out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Back in Fourth or Fifth grade, I knew a kid named Billy who made the\u00c2\u00a0statement that the first time he saw The Wizard of Oz… I don’t quite\u00c2\u00a0recall, either he was rooting for the tornado to blow Dorthoy away or he\u00c2\u00a0was hoping she would never find her way back to Kansas again.\u00c2\u00a0 Something horrible, at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2726","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2726","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2726"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2726\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2726"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2726"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2726"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}