Colonel Shaw
I’ve been spying these daily writing prompts in the corner of my dashboard the last few days, wondering if they were something I would ever care to utilize. This evening as I was considering what to post for tomorrow, I saw “Have you ever performed on a stage?” and immediately had a flashback to 1995 and my performance as Colonel Shaw in the play Glory. I’m assuming it was severely abridged for fifth graders. I do know it was shortly after we had read the book Shades of Gray by Carolyn Reeder. I remember my costume smelled funny. I do not recall where that costume was acquired or where it went when I was done wearing it. I think it was meant to teach us an important part of history, but I was not thinking about Lincoln’s War Between the States when I was barking out my Colonel Shaw lines, I was thinking about how I was the shortest girl in the class playing a man in charge of stuff. For the record, I’m a terrible actress and I have no idea how or why I was awarded this role in whatever fifth grade extravaganza was occurring.
Fifth grade was an awkward time when the man I thought would be my favorite teacher ever got deported–to Canada–for an expired Visa, and in return we got the “new” lady. She hated me, got in arguments with my mom, and I still (in my 40s) think she was a moron. Time did not grant me more grace for her, although I do credit her for having Tolkien’s The Hobbit and Field’s Hitty, Her First Hundred Years in her classroom library. Both of which I loved. She’s also the teacher who read Bridge to Terabithia out loud every afternoon until she had her entire class bawling. So, she was either awesome for introducing us to a great book, or a little sadistic for emotionally traumatizing us all. Who knows?
My track record with teachers wasn’t great. In sixth grade I got an amazing GT language arts teacher I will adore forever and we got her again for seventh grade GT, and then she died. Once again, our class got the “new” lady. A fresh out of college gal the boys tormented by just calling her Wendy. She looked like Wendy from Peter Pan, her name was Wendy for real, I still don’t remember her last name because no one ever respected her enough to use it. She lived in my neighborhood with her parents, talked about her boyfriend (who couldn’t spell) a lot, and in hindsight I wonder how any twenty-two year olds enter their classrooms for their first year without having a panic attack. I think that was the year I played a dead girl in theatre and laughed through the entire play. My theatre teacher told me she loved me, but she didn’t want me on her stage again. We laughed. We hugged. When I was in Oklahoma! in high school, I was a chorus girl who happily sat in the barn close to the shotgun mic. I’m not a great dancer either, but I love to sing. Too bad Colonel Shaw didn’t have any singing lines. I’d definitely watch Glory as a Broadway musical, they could still use Matthew Broderick and everything.
The Wild Girls – A Review
Title: The Wild Girls
Author: Pat Murphy
Publisher: Speak (an imprint of Penguin Group)
Genre: Young Adult
Length: 288 pages
Dear Publishing Companies,
Allow me to tell you something you probably already know: Take a book, add a matte finish to it, trace some swirly-like-ivy lines about, and add a garden or forest scene – I will most likely take the book home on the spot.
At least that’s what happened with Pat Murphy’s The Wild Girls. And despite having an equally girly and gardeny looking book on my night stand (The Distant Hours
Even if the cover had not been so fabulous, the first line is:
“I met the Queen of the Foxes in 1972, when my family moved from Connecticut to California.”
How do you pass up a first line like that?
It’s a story about twelve year old girls for twelve year old girls, but at twenty-nine I was still dying to know all about the Queen of the Foxes and how interesting a girl would have to be to have the honor of meeting her.
My own wild girl, running, after we read in the park and took a boat ride, but before we had our picnic in the grass.
Joan meets Sarah in the woods behind an old orchard and immediately takes to her even though Sarah is malicious and contemplating throwing rocks at her. She can hit a kid dead on from about thirty feet away, too. Soon the girls are fast friends with woodsy aliases Newt and Fox, telling and writing stories together as they each escape their lives in the comfort and enchanting beauty of the woods and its wildlife.
In the spirit of Bridge to Terabithia (without the inevitable water works), The Secret Garden (without the invalid), and a dash of How to Buy a Love of Reading (or writing), The Wild Girls is a great coming of age story for girls harboring an inner Josephine March (Little Women).
I loved it. I read a lot of it to kiddo outside and she loved it as it served for a great book to welcome spring. I can’t wait to read it again when she is older and see what she thinks of it then.
In the mean time, I’m looking for more Pat Murphy titles, reading Kate Morton, and writing a novel.
Anakalian Whims 