Art and About – Archive

Three years ago when I started doing Art and About, I wrote a column about making my own thank-you notes. I described how I folded blank pieces of cardstock and used leftover crafting materials to put my unique stamp on each individual thank-you card I wrote. That column remains one of the most commented on pieces I have written, so like any successful form of entertainment, I am writing a sequel. And I believe this is better than the original.

Sometime after my son turned one, I started having his design his own thank-you cards. When he was really little, we did hand and footprints because we found his public couldn’t get enough of those, and since a toddler’s prints are ever growing and changing, it became a nice marker in time for people. As he became adept at working with paints, he would do finger-painted cards, and eventually graduated to using a paintbrush. After passing his second birthday, he decided mixed media represented his artistic voice, and he would create thank-you cards combining paint, crayon, colored pen, oil pastels, and anything else that made a mark on the page. As he learned to use scissors, we got him a set of fancy crafting shears with which he could cut fringes or shapes that rarely fit into a standard stationery envelope, but we sent them nonetheless.

As we approach his fourth birthday later this month, my son has gone full circle back to paints, but now he strives to create representational art. After his third birthday, we switched from having me write the notes to requiring that he dictate his own thank-you message, so now the inside of the card is as special as the outside.

I started my daughter out on the painted thank-you cards when she was eight-months-old, last December. She refused to hold still long enough for a hand or footprint, and latched right on to doing brushwork. As this past year has progressed, she has focused all her attentions on crayons. She has the lightest touch and creates feathery designs with delicate strokes.

This December, my kids are developing their own line of stationery. Using heavily diluted watercolor, my son created rainbow swirls of artistry in colors light enough that the words of the penned notes can be read. My daughter did Crayola abstracts with her signature ginger touch. With the help of Allegro Copy and Print in Lafayette, we are having their names printed on each sheet, like big-person stationery, so they will be all set to write thank-you notes come December 26.

All of this is great, but two of my son’s preschool classmates have created the ultimate thank-you cards, and it is their idea that I really want to share. These sisters illustrated a bunch of thank-you cards and gave them, beautifully wrapped, as a gift to their teacher for her birthday. AND THEN, the teacher used the thank-you cards to write thank-you notes to everyone for the gifts she had received. It’s brilliant!

To me, this idea is the ultimate in the gift that keeps on giving. I see at least three values at work here. The child is immersed in the concept of saying thank-you by creating one-of-a-kind thank-you notes. The child, as the artist, is given an opportunity to creatively express herself. And the child is giving of herself while getting directly involved in the gift-giving process rather than her parent just going out and buying something.

I can’t think of a better way to get our kids profoundly in touch with the true spirit of holiday gift-giving than to do a project like this with them for anyone with whom they exchange gifts. I suspect both giver and receiver will be filled with the joys of the season.

My husband was taking a continuing education class in Internet security when the topic of The Happy Dance came up. His instructor, a professor at Georgetown University who also does consulting, said that once, out of the corner of his eye, he had seen a computer engineer Happy Dancing after a major breakthrough with a programming problem. The wordless Happy Dance communicated everything anyone needed to know about how the solution was coming along.

For this instructor, Happy Dancing has become one marker of identifying someone who is personally invested in his work, as opposed to someone who is just doing a job. Something like a Happy Dance can tell him about an employee’s personal investment in finding a good result. Happy Dancing is enthusiasm personified. This instructor went on to say that when interviewing job applicants, he will ask them to get up and do their Happy Dance.

As my husband related this story to me, I became intrigued. I had always considered Happy Dancing something done in front of trusted family, friends or co-workers. It didn’t occur to me that one could even Happy Dance on demand in front of a prospective employer, or that one could Happy Dance without the proper emotional trigger.

My husband firmly believes that Happy Dancing is not something to be done on demand, but I admit, a couple of times since this discussion I have  tried to Happy Dance for no particular reason. It’s a little tough to get started, but sort of like method acting, when I conjure a past achievement that led to a Happy Dance, I can get the moves back into my body fairly quickly. And sort of like smile therapy, doing a Happy Dance for no particular reason made me feel happy. Who knows? Maybe perfecting the ability to do a calculated Happy Dance could affect a person’s over health and well-being?

I know you want to get up and try spontaneous Happy Dancing right now, so I’ll wrap this up as quickly as I can.

I am still intrigued by this classroom discussion on a topic that has never come up in any conversation in which I have been a part. I asked my husband if he has seen Happy Dancing in his workplace. He said he has. He has even Happy Danced himself. He works for a bank that staunchly adheres to the traditional corporate environment model you would expect from a bank. Here I have been imagining a lot of starched collars and instead, they are Happy Dancing.

I have worked in several corporate environments, many of which were staffed by very creative individuals. I can’t ever remember seeing a Happy Dance, unless people were dancing behind closed doors or in meetings to which I wasn’t invited. I don’t know if this means anything, but I find it interesting.

What I like best about the Happy Dance discussion is that it has taught me that spontaneous explosions of primal artistic expression are happening everyday in normal, everyday interactions, whether I know about them or not. It seems to be evidence that an artful soul does indeed live within all of us, and sometimes it can even overwhelm us to move to our own groove in celebration of a personal victory, no matter who’s with us or where we’re located at the time. This knowledge alone makes me want to do a Happy Dance.

Mike from PG&E came over a couple of weeks ago to give our furnaces their annual tune-up before the cold weather hits. Upon walking in our front door, he did what most everyone does the first time they enter our home. His eyes slowly circled the walls of our entryway, living room and dining room, which are covered with a multitude of framed theater posters. Actually, the correct term is “window cards,” but hardly anyone knows what that means.

After the eyes scan, a comment invariably follows. Many people don’t know what they are. Some think they are movie posters (actually, to see our movie posters you have to turn a sharp right into the kitchen and head straight into our family room.) More than half realize they are window cards from plays. But Mike immediately noticed that of the 70 posters on display, all but 15 represented musicals. At first, he made the insightful comment we have heard before, “You like the musicals, huh?”

As he worked on the furnace, other comments came in periodic intervals.

“Have you seen all these shows?” The answer is “yes,” and hundreds more. These are only the posters from the shows which exploit all merchandising options.

“Did you really go to Broadway to see these shows?” Our collection is divided into two almost equal parts — shows we saw in London, and shows from various domestic productions.

“Do you do shows?” I told him although I love to sing, and did some shows in childhood and high school, I realized early on that I don’t have the temperament to do the same thing over and over again, night after night in rehearsal and performance.

“Are you still singing?” Yes, but rarely show tunes outside the confines of my home.

Mike worked in silence the rest of his visit, and then it came time for me to sign the paperwork. While I was giving him my autograph, Mike sighed and shared that his son used to sing in high school. Mike Jr. even won several vocal awards. But now that he’s in college, he’s not singing at all.

I quoted my father-in-law who says, “Music always comes back.” Mike repeated, “Music always comes back. Can I hold you to that?”

Mike is not the first parent I have spoken with who is lamenting a child’s apparent abandonment of a favored artform when he or she goes to college. I know the age group well enough to guess that most artistic coeds fit into one of four categories. There is the percentage who sang/painted/danced/drew/acted in high school and can’t wait to try out their talents in a bigger pond. Then there are those who spent a lot of time in high school developing their art, perhaps partially because they thought it would be an aspect of their college application that would give them an edge in a competitive admissions pool, and now that they are in college, they need to take a break to separate the art from the ulterior motive. There are those who felt like they had been put in a box labeled “Mike the Singer,” “Sarah the Painter,” “Morgan the Dancer,” and in college they are desperate to highlight other areas of their personalities. And then there are those who think the fast track to Med School/Biz School/Law School does not go through an art studio or rehearsal hall.

The artistic soul does not go away, though. It may lie dormant for a while, or it may torment the body in which it is housed until it is once again allowed to soar. But it does always come back. The rest of us just need to be patient while the artists find their own paths.

My 10-year college reunion is this weekend, and in honor of the occasion, I have finally finished my senior thesis for my Bachelor of Arts degree in history and communication. As far as my college knows, I turned the thesis in 10 years ago, got an “A” and my degree, but I think my professor was mostly rewarding the fact that I could skillfully use all the b.s. smoke and mirrors available to me in writing an academic research paper on an esoteric subject, which she, an expert in 18th-century England, had never dreamed of tackling.

I wrote my paper about the 18th-century British stage actors who have the historical distinction of the being the first generation of thespians in England to be considered “stars” and not low-life professionals one-step-up from prostitutes in their career pursuits. I queried, “Why did actors suddenly become ‘stars?’”

Ten years ago, I turned my thesis in with a bogus, unfulfilling conclusion. Over 41 pages, I expound on the fact that there was a confluence of good P.R. and marketing factors in 18th-century England to lift those in the acting profession to stardom and socially acceptable celebrity. It was a time when printing and mass media put theater reviews, gossip and collectible images into the hands of the theater patrons from the middle and upper classes. The monarchy supported the arts and passed Acts to legitimize theater. And a talented and popular actor named David Garrick lived an enviable artistic life full of perceived virtue with a stellar Puritan work ethic making him as worthy of positive attention as the local bishop. I only fell asleep twice when re-reading my paper to prepare for this column.

The paper I turned in for a grade needed to have primary sources to back it up. I found fantastic primary sources about the concrete reasons actors might have become “stars.” However, the research paper I really wanted to write had to do with ineffable emotional connections between artists and audience and the innate human need to live an artful life directly or by proxy. It’s the same thesis I hammer bi-monthly in this column. Perhaps if I had access to hundreds of diaries of 18th-century theatergoers, I could have written the paper I really wanted. But my university archive didn’t have those, and so the paper had to change a little in order for me to finish by the end of the quarter.

Ten-years later, with a little perspective, I realize that my dissatisfaction with my research is underscored by the title I chose, “Living in a World of Make-Believe: The Implications of Actresses on the Public Stage in Eighteenth Century England.” It’s a pretty heady title, but not at all what I actually wrote about. I was obviously confused then, and that confusion has plagued me since.

Through this column, I believe I have finally found a self-satisfying answer to my research question. Actors with a cult of personality feed the human desire to feast on the arts in everyday life. Actors became “stars” in 18th-century England because for the first time, through the use of mass media, they were able to touch large numbers of people with their art. Even if someone couldn’t always go to the theater, they could follow the art through the newspaper, or the local trinket manufacturer selling mass-produced portraits or sculptures. The ephemeral art of stage acting became a part of our daily celebration of the arts during 18th-century England.

I can’t substantiate my new conclusion with primary sources and speculation from world-class scholars, but it feels right to me. Art is mostly about feelings, anyway. Cue the “Pomp and Circumstance.”

This summer, both of our cars went belly up. They were both old, and both had been in hospice care for a long time so their deaths were not unexpected. What was unexpected was that they would go within three months of each other leaving us as a zero-car family.

Choosing a new automobile for our family of four was pretty easy. It’s choosing a license plate that is requiring long, late night conversations between my husband, Matthew, and me.

Years ago, I decided that when I got a new car, I would get one of the California arts license plates. I didn’t realize that you could turn in your old plates at any time and buy an arts plate, which helps fund the California Arts Council for statewide arts programming, arts education and local arts within communities. The plate is $30, with about half of the sales proceeds going to the Arts Council, and the entire $15 renewal fee each year goes to the Council.

Matthew knows I have wanted an arts plate for a long time, and he supports that. So we went online to the DMV Web site to see what the plate looks like. We both thought we had never actually seen one. Wrong. I see them all the time, which is good and bad.

The arts plate is the one with the palm trees on the left and the rising sun over the ocean on the right. It is a classic California scene, and it seems like everyone has it. In fact, I learned from the DMV Web site that the arts plate, designed by Northern California artist Wayne Thiebaud, is the most popular specialty plate in California, with over 120,000 plates sold since 1994, raising more then $6.6 million for the arts. I love that statistic. I don’t love the plate. Matthew really doesn’t love the plate.

For some reason, we thought the arts plate would be more overtly visually political in its support of the arts. A painter’s palette, a theater façade, ballet shoes or even the Hollywood sign. My husband particularly doesn’t like that the plate represents a more typical Southern California scene rather than incorporating a Northern California image, and as a Northern Californian, he’s offended. He also just plain doesn’t think the picture is art.

After lengthy discussion we realized that since the plate itself does not make a statement about arts support, we needed to customize the plate so that it does make a statement. Personalized arts plates are $70, and $41.91 of that is a tax deductible donation.

Matt deferred to my arts message over his own, since this car is primarily a Mommy-mobile. Because of those palm trees on the left, the arts plate only gave me six symbols to say everything I ever wanted to say about the arts. And I thought 600 words per column was limiting.

It forced me to focus on the essence of my political message. Originally, I thought I wanted to make a statement, with my wallet and my car, about supporting the arts. But instead, the most important message is the one that informs this column, and all the arts stories I’ve ever written for the newspaper, and any arts conversation I’ve ever had. I want people to celebrate the artistic in their daily lives, with every breath, in everything they do and everywhere they go. My statement is “Be Artsy,” or B ARTSY, in license plate speak. Actually, that plate is taken, so now I need to Be Artsy is discovering a creative combination of symbols to shout my message down the highways and byways of California.

Every kid has to endure at least one topic that his or her parent gets really heated over — a topic that causes great embarrassment to the child, the parent, all the family’s ancestors and every generation yet to come. For my kids, I suspect that topic is going to be the arts.

When the arts come up in conversation, a news article, from someone’s personal testimonial, or when I am simply touched through an artistic experience, it is not uncommon for me to cry, shriek, laugh loudly, jump up and down, get angry, whoop — whatever response is appropriate for the ultra-positive or ultra-negative nature of the moment. I can already envision my kids rolling their eyes, slinking out of the room and denying that they ever knew me.

Right now, however, my daughter is 18 months and my son is almost four. They get just as excited, if not more so, when the arts touch their lives. And no one is a harsher critic than a preschooler who doesn’t like a particular song, movie, story or painting. Young children seem to have an almost primal relationship with the arts, creating it and receiving it as a pure, unadulterated communication between human beings.

And even at their young ages, my kids have learned that they can make the most profound connection with their mom not through words, not through a hug, but through the arts.

The day after Labor Day was the first day of preschool for my son, Tyrian. It was a big day, but not the huge deal it might have been since Tyrian had participated in a summer program at the school he would be attending this fall. I wasn’t nervous about it, and Tyrian happily got up, got dressed, ate breakfast, grabbed his backpack and announced it was time to go.

When we arrived at school, the door wasn’t open yet and only one other mom and her daughter had arrived. That mom told me she had spent the entire weekend with her tummy in knots. I was grateful that I had been able to relax during my holiday weekend.

As kids started arriving, some were accompanied by both parents and grandparents. There was an excited buzz from most of the crowd. I hadn’t even thought to ask my husband if he wanted to come, or to invite the grandparents to be part of the entourage.

The teacher opened the door and the kids rushed to their cubbies to hang up their bags. Cameras were flashing as tots picked their first activity and dived right in. With the summer program under our belts, this was so old hat that I hadn’t even considered bringing a camera.

One or two moms started weeping a little when it was time to say goodbye. I can cry with the best of ‘em, but on this day, I was caught up in the fun and wonder of the bright and cheerful classroom.
Tyrian sat down at the art table, grabbed some colored pens and began drawing. He seemed settled to me, so I went over to kiss him goodbye.

“No, don’t leave yet,” he told me.

My stomach clenched. I thought, “Oh no, he’s more nervous than I thought.” In a millisecond I envisioned an ugly goodbye scene.

But Tyrian shoved the picture he was working on out of the way, got himself three fresh pieces of paper and whipped off three drawings. He gave them to me saying one was for me, one was for Daddy and one was for his sister. Having given me a bit of himself to tide me over until we were reunited in three hours, he off to play.

So it was I, the cucumber-cool Mommy, who went home weeping.

A friend sent me the web link to a picture of a quilt entitled “Ground Zero,” conceived of and created by a woman shortly after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The quilters name is Lois Jarvis of Madison, Wisconsin. Her memorial to those who died is so powerful that no matter how often I look at the image of the quilt, I feel like someone just punched me in the chest and the tears start pooling in my eyes. If you’re sitting near a computer, go see for yourself right now, http://www.gzquilt.com/About_the_Quilt/about_the_quilt.html.

This is one of the cases where a thousand words can’t do the picture justice, but I’ll try. Jarvis used a Lone Star pattern comprised of over 700 diamonds to look like an explosion blasting out from an epicenter. On each diamond, she printed the face of someone who died on September 11, using photos she downloaded from CNN shortly after the tragedy. Bordering the blast are panels of gray to represent the smoke, the dust and the sorrow. It sounds too simplistic when I describe it here. Please go look at it for yourself.

In her artist’s statement, Jarvis writes, “I am not as eloquent with words as some people are. And why I needed to make this quilt I could not say. I do not personally know anyone who perished that day. I don’t plan to sell this quilt. So why I made it is a mystery to me. All I can say is that I felt I should do it because I knew I could do it.”

Jarvis’ written statement strikes me almost as profoundly as her quilted one.

Ms. Jarvis, it is no mystery to me why you made this quilt. You do not need words when you have been granted the language of imagery.
I am fortunate to have a job where I get to hang out with visual artists, and one apology regularly comes up in conversation when I try to talk to them: “Sorry, I’m not very good with words.”

Since I am a word-based life form, I always have to chuckle to myself when I hear this and contemplate replying, “Sorry, I’m not very good with images.” When I see what an artist such as Jarvis can create without words, I feel hopelessly inadequate. I can ramble on and on and never capture the emotional pit this country was shoved into on September 11. With even the fastest glance at “Ground Zero,” I can instantly be taken back to my emotions of that day. I am in awe of anyone with that ability to communicate, and I am sorry that anyone in the visual realm feels they have to apologize for not being able to deliver a snappy sound bite or newspaper quote. I am sorry that we live in a society where one’s glibness is a measure of communicative worth. I am relieved that not everyone can or wants to bubble over in verbiage. It gives my ears a periodic rest and my eyes something far more interesting to rest upon than reams of black type on white paper.

I wonder how many of the 2996 people who died on September 11 ever apologized for the talents they did not have. I wonder how many embraced the talents they did have and were mindful that the world would be a boring place if we were all the same. I wonder how many were thankful that human begins are blessed with the astounding gift of creative expression. I hope the spirits of everyone, living and dead, find peace with the voice they are given.

I’ve been wondering a lot lately whether artistic style is hereditary. We just bought a house and have a lot of redecorating and remodeling plans in the works to make the house “our own.” As a creative starting point, I decided to try to define what “our own” looks like.

I’ll preface this exercise by admitting that like many American couples, “our own” looks more like “my own” than “my husband’s own.”  Fortunately our tastes are tremendously similar, which makes decorating easy in our house. Hubby will definitely squawk when I make an aesthetic decision that he finds morally offensive, but otherwise we have excellent give and take in the idea-exchange department.
What I learned when I examined our style is that we live in a giant grid. Our design is very linear, with the dominant shapes being squares and rectangles. Our favorite pieces of furniture have straight lines and square shapes. Our art is hung in rectangular frames grouped in rectangular configurations. Our favorite rug has a square pattern on it. We use patchwork quilts and pillows as accent pieces. I adore a coffee table my husband made in junior high, which has an oak frame surrounding a tile chessboard design. We have a decorating theme with almost no variation.

Although I like the sense of order communicated to me through squares and straight lines, I have had to wonder if I am drawn to living life in a grid because of my forebears. My mother and grandmother quilt. My paternal grandfather was a mosaic artist. None of them has been confined to square designs, but there is a strong rectilinear component to their chosen artforms.

Although I don’t often express myself through visual art, when I do, my chosen artform is decoupage, which I consider a lazy-woman’s version of mosaic or quilting. Decoupage designs are unlimited in their freedom of movement, but mine are all comprised of squares and rectangles. This was not a conscious decision at the time of creation, but something I have noticed in retrospect. It’s a little spooky, actually. And genealogically fascinating.

With seven years of higher education to legitimate, I’ve contemplated whether mosaics, quilting and decoupage reflect something more about me than simply a preference for restrictive order. Does art imitate life?

I think I see my life as a mosaic or a patchwork quilt. Different memories, experiences, people and places each inhabit a square in my life story. Each is a self-contained unit, significant by itself. But when the lens pulls pack to see the entire picture, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

I have another ongoing project that constantly provokes me to argue artistic nature versus creative nurture. I inherited innumerable boxes of would-be scrapbook material from my dad when he died. Everything was sorted and organized, but it never made it into a book, which is my current mission. The mounds of paper he kept go back to his earliest years, and every 100 pieces or so, my heart starts racing when I find a newspaper clipping of a theater review, or a photo from a magazine or artistic reflections he wrote to himself that match something I have in my very own scrapbook. Although there is no doubt that my love of theater and creative endeavor was nurtured in my childhood, to see evidence of my dad as a teenager responding to artistry the way I do takes my breath away. It may not be hard for someone like Natalie Cole to figure out where her love of music and performing came from. For me, artistic heredity is subtler, but has an equally strong influence on my life. There are a lot more people influencing “our own” than I originally thought.

I was walking with my mother-in-law one Sunday morning after she had just spent a couple of hours exploring the wonders of nature along Monterey Bay with my son. She reflected on the gift young children give us by reminding us to notice and appreciate the smallest details, like whether a flower has four petals or five.

Her comment came back to me as I viewed “Revealing Nature’s Mysteries: the Photography of Susan Reynolds,” on exhibit at the Lindsay Wildlife Museum in Walnut Creek. Since childhood, Susan has profoundly appreciated the wonder of nature, and has the artistic talent to capture it in photographs in a way that reflects the vital emotional, psychological and spiritual relationship between humans and the earth. As a fourth generation Californian, she also uses her camera as a tool for environmental activism, with the hope that every time someone connects with an image from nature through her photographs, she has won another crusader toward the cause of preserving wild and open spaces.

I was lucky enough to walk through the exhibit with Susan. Over half the photos are images taken a relatively short distance away from all of our homes. The hills, grasses, rocks, trees, clouds and sunlight are familiar to all of us, but you may have never looked at them the way Susan has. She notices the splendor of the details, and admits that even she has only recently come to appreciate some of her most local photographs. She is understandably in awe of the natural grandeur in places like Glacier Natural Park and Death Valley, images from which are also included in this show. But in re-examining the multitudes of photos she has taken on hikes beginning practically outside her back door, she found images that she calls “just as amazing and grand” in their own way. Many of these images she never considered showing until an injury forced her to slow down and she found herself noticing details that had even escaped her conscientious eyes.

While we’re speeding on the freeway past the land preserved by East Bay Regional Parks, or jogging on a path looking neither left nor right at the astounding environment in which we choose to reside, too many of us don’t stop to think about a buckeye, or an oak, or lichen on a rock. We don’t think about how the light on a California hillside is distinctly different each season, each time of day, or even from moment to moment.

I grew up here and can honestly say I never thought about Contra Costa landscape as being special in any way. Three factors have spurred me to treasure our natural environment and fight to save it. When I entered the housing market six years ago, I became profoundly aware of how much humanity is forced upon us. Suddenly, I started looking for escapes in nature to get away from people and people products.

Then I started meeting local artists, and I learned that the light and landscape of my home county is unique, which is why it inspires so much creative activity around here.

And lastly, my children make it a point to show me that some flowers have four petals while others have five.

While searching for my keys in my purse after saying goodbye to Susan, my fingers found a leaf my son gave me months ago after a walk around our neighborhood. Susan had just told me that the Iroquois Indians have a saying: “Think seven generations ahead.” I think I heard my great-great-great-great-great grandchildren’s voices when I held that leaf.

My first-born was barely a few days old when someone remarked, “Wouldn’t it be great to be a baby? All you have to do is eat and sleep.” Although I was only a new mom, there was nothing I had observed in my tike’s daily life that made me think he had it so good. The only way he could communicate with the buffoon adults in his life was to cry, and nothing that I take for granted, like muscle control and bodily functions, was easy for him. But that first person wasn’t the only one to make the comment, and every now and again I run into an adult who wistfully gazes upon my children and sighs about how great it is to be young and carefree.

I find this attitude intriguing, and I don’t subscribe to it in any way. Kids have a lot of things they have to sort out in their day-to-day lives to give them the library of experience that once again, I take for granted as an adult. They may not have to worry about paying the bills, but they do have to navigate hairy situations like sharing their favorite truck with other youngsters at the playground. Now that’s stressful. I had a good childhood and a fairly smooth adolescence but there is nothing in the world that would make me go back to any other age than I am right now.

Well, maybe one thing.

In my adulthood, my imagination has lost its innocence and I really want it back. This realization became clear to me just last week when I was confronted with the first example of life experience ruining a perfectly good childhood memory.

My kids discovered the wonders of the DVD version of “Free to Be…You and Me” and started playing it repeatedly. At first, this made my heart soar. As a true child of the ’70s, I loved Marlo Thomas’ reinvention of storytelling stereotypes, and the record played continuously in our house during my formative years. I still know every song and story by heart, and they still make me want to dance and sing.

By I had a rude awakening when my 32-year-old brain accessed its bank of knowledge while watching the DVD version. When I was a kid, I didn’t know Alan Alda, Mel Brooks, Harry Belafonte and Michael Jackson were supplying some of the talent. But now when I listen to their voices, I’m continually thinking, “Hey, that’s Mel Brooks.” Or I’m envisioning the familiar body language of Alan Alda. Or the irony of Michael Jackson singing, “We don’t have to change at all” in a song about accepting yourself and others for the way they look.

And as an adult, I may be able to appreciate the multiple levels of meaning imparted by casting Rosey Grier to sing “It’s All Right to Cry,” but that song was already pretty deep for me, so I don’t necessarily embrace the enlightenment.

The loss of my imagination’s innocence is an unwelcome visitor, showing up when I least expect it. Another recent example is when I watched “Finding Nemo,” which I think is a wonderful film. But I will always see the lead fish not as Marlin and Dory but as Albert Brooks and Ellen DeGeneres. Both actors are superb in their voicework for the film, but I am unable to completely let go of their real identities and travel under the sea with them in suspension of disbelief. I envy my kids who are getting the full thrill of the movie by knowing the characters only within the context of the story. Enjoy it while it lasts, kids!