Day 4 - Charles Richard Drew - Blood Man

Charles Richard Drew 1904 - 1950

The mister has been giving blood since he was in his twenties. These days he gives platelets.

He donates at least twice a month. Sometimes, if the Red Cross is having a shortage of his blood type they call him and he makes a special trip.

Most people probably do not think twice about how we bank blood, or who developed the procedures for collecting and storing blood products. Luckily, right around World War II, people were thinking about this pretty intensely.

Charles Richard Drew was born in Washington, DC in 1950 to a middle-class African American family. His father was a carpet layer, and his mother was trained as a teacher.

He was not a brilliant student when he was young, but he was an excellent athlete.

In 1922, Drew earned an athletic scholarship to Amherst College in Massachusetts. He was one of 13 African Americans in a school of 300. In his senior year, he was passed over for captain of the football team even though he was the best player.

As far as academics? He had no idea what he wanted to do until he took a biology class. It changed the entire course of his life. He decided to study medicine.

Unfortunately, there were very limited opportunities for black people interested in any science. Many of the programs in America wouldn't consider accepting a black student into their programs. His path to becoming a doctor was very narrow.

He did his graduate work at McGill University College of Medicine in Montreal, Canada. While he was at McGill, he won lots of prestigious awards, scholarships, and was on the staff of The McGill Medical Journal.

In 1933, Drew graduated second in his class of 137 earning his MD and CM (Mastery of Surgery) Degrees.

From 1933 - 1935 Drew did his surgical internship at Montreal Hospital. It was at this time that he became interested in transfusions and working with blood products.

Freedmen's Hospital

He wanted to study at the Mayo Clinic, but black doctors were banned from practicing there. Mayo's loss was Howard University's gain.

He joined the faculty at Howard, and taught classes as well as interning at Freedmen's Hospital.  He worked his way up to Chief Surgical Resident.

In 1938, Drew studied at Columbia University for his doctorate. He won a fellowship to got to New York and study with the eminent surgeon,  Allen Whipple at Presbyterian Hospital in New York.

When Charles Drew arrived, instead of giving him the duties he was supposed to have working in labs and seeing patients, Whipple assigned Drew to a grant project that was being run by John Scudder to set up an experimental blood bank. This way none of the white patients or lab technicians had to either work with, be supervised by, or encounter Drew.

John Scudder was not unhappy to have him,

"Scudder considered his protÉgÉ “naturally great” and a “brilliant pupil” and Whipple would later be won over by Drew’s talent, supporting both his surgical training and doctoral research. Drew and Scudder focused their research on diagnosing and controlling shock, fluid balance, blood chemistry, preservation, and transfusion — the work on which he based his seminal dissertation, "Banked Blood: A Study in Blood Preservation." Scudder remarked that the thesis was “a masterpiece” and “one of the most distinguished essays ever written, both in form and content.”

Drew married Minnie Lenore Robbins in 1939. Minnie was a professor of home economics at Spelman College.

In 1942, Charles Drew earned a Doctor of Science in Medicine from Columbia University. He was the first African American to have done so.

Scudder recruited Drew to help him set up a blood bank in England in WWII for the war effort.

The process Drew, Scudder, and E. H. L. Corwin created to store and ship blood products safely is the model we use today.

Drew went back to Howard and worked hard to train black physicians. His dream was to create the most excellent physicians anywhere in the country.

He also worked with the Red Cross to establish blood banks around the country.

Source

Charles Drew was the person who came up with the idea of a "bloodmobile" and the necessary equipment needed to safely store and transport the collected blood to blood banks.

Despite Drew being the pioneer of the way the Red Cross collects and stores blood, the organization did not accept blood from African Americans.

Drew wasn't able to donate. He railed against this restriction as nonsensical and unscientific. He said it was insulting to African Americans who were just as eager to help the war effort as any other Americans.

The Red Cross did eventually start allowing blacks to donate, but they kept their blood segregated.



There are some stories that Charles Drew resigned his position as Assistant Director of the National Blood Donor program and returned to teach full time at Howard because he was so disgusted by the Red Cross's policies about how they handled African American blood donations.

There are also those who claim he had always planned to go back to Howard to teach and that he had been too long away from his wife and their first child, BeBe whose name is really the initials for Blood Bank.

In 1950 he was off to a conference after having been in surgery the night before and fell asleep at the wheel. The car went off the road and into a field where it cartwheeled several times.

The other people in the car had minor injuries, but Drew's foot got caught beneath the brake pedal, and his leg was horribly mangled.

Despite rushing him to a hospital and getting all the treatment possible, Charles Drew died of his wounds.

There are stories in the cultural fabric of this country that Drew died because he was denied a transfusion that would have saved his life, but that is just urban legend.

The Drew Family

His legacy of commitment to creating strong, knowledgable healthcare professionals lives on in a small private University in California. In 1966, as a way to combat poor access to healthcare for African Americans and as part of the Civil Rights movement to promote equality, The Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science was established.

The next time you hear about a blood drive, or give any blood products, or drive by a Red Cross, you are looking at the enduring legacy of one of America's Genius African American Physicians.

There is so much I left out of this quick sketch about how incredible and brilliant this man was. Follow some of the links and they will lead you to other links.

I'm a history nerd. I've been down this rabbit hole for the last two days and I've only surfaced to write down a few notes!

Lastly, I love it when my worlds collide.

In February of 2018, Minnie Lenore Robbins Drew's grandson interviewed his mother about his grandmother on StoryCorps. The interview is 12 minutes long. Have a listen!

Thank you, Dr. Charles Richard Drew for all that you gave us.

Celebrate African American History Month!

Day 1 - The ABC's of Black History Month

Day 2 - Archie Alphonso Alexander - Mathematician/Engineer

Day 3 - Sarah Boone - Inventor and Domestic Goddess
Day 4 - Charles R. Drew - Blood Man
Day 5 - Mary Beatrice Davidson Kenner - Inventor of The Sanitary Pad

Day 6 - Ernest Everett Just - Biologist, Zoologist, Cell man
Day 7 - Frederick McKinley Jones - The Coolest Man in Modern History

Day 8 - Sarah Goode - A Practical Bed For Small Spaces
Day 9 - William Henry Cling - Did He Invent The Hospital Bed Before Gatch?
Day 10 - Inez Beverly Prosser and Brown V.S. The Board of Education
Day 11 - Jan Ernst Mateliger - Mechanical Engineer/Sole Man
Day 12 - Samuel L. Kountz Jr. - Revolutionized Transplant Surgery
Day 13 - Lewis Howard Latimer - Incandescent Inventor
Day 14 - Marie Van Brittan Brown - Home Security
Day 15 - Norbert Rillieux - Sugar Man
Day 16 - Otis Boykin - He Kept Hearts Beating
Day 17 - Alice H. Parker - Heating It Up!
Day 18 - Lloyd Quarterman - Chemist and Atom Man
Day 19 - Robert F. Flemming Jr. - Guitar Man
Day 20 - Charles S. L. Baker - The Friction Radiator 
Day 21 - Granville T. Woods - The Black Edison
Day 22 - Alfred L. Cralle - Next Time You Have Ice Cream...
Day 23 - Ellen Elgin - Through The Wringer
Day 24 - Dr. Daniel Hale Williams - Holding A Heart In the Palm of His Hands
Day 26 - Elijah McCoy - The Real One
Day 27 - Alexander Miles - Hold The Door, Please!

Day 3 - Sarah Boone 1832 - 1904 - Inventor and Dress Maker

Sarah Marshall Boone 1832 - 1904

Sarah Marshall was born in 1832 in Craven County North Carolina near New Bern.

She married freedman James Boone in 1847 when she was 15.

Prior to the start of the Civil War, the couple moved to New Haven, Connecticut where they lived the rest of their lives.



Sarah worked as a dressmaker. She spent lots of time making, prepping, and showing her work. She also spent lots of time fitting dresses on clients.

One thing that is true of dressmakers is that they have to do lots of ironing. Sarah was no different.

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Ironing has been going on for as long as people have demanded their garments be wrinkle free. The oldest known examples of this come from....the Vikings. Yes, apparently you should be well turned out before you sack and burn.

Viking ironing boards were made of whalebone, and they used heated rocks or glass to smooth their fabric.





I could not find any information about how the craze of ironing spread throughout Europe, but I suspect it was the success the Vikings had at invading surrounding non-Viking cultures and infusing them with their own people and customs.

a really old iron

In any case, the newly wrinkle free Europeans needed something other than whalebone because there were way too many people ironing. This led to using whatever table they had handy. The process was simple.


You heat up a piece of iron, put some kind of cloth over your table so you don't ruin the wood, put whatever you mean to make wrinkle-free on top of the cloth, and make it happen.

Not every woman ironed on her table. Some of them got the idea to get a board and balance it between two chairs. They would then put some kind of cloth on the board, put the thing they wish to make wrinkle-free on top of the cloth and make it happen.

Woman ironing with board on chairs

By the 19th century, ironing had not only been exported to the Americas, but there was apparently lots of advice about the best type of cloth to put on your board or ironing table in order to get the smoothest look.


The best choice? Swanskin.

Swanskin

I was pretty mortified until I did some more reading and discovered that they weren't suggesting that women should go down to their local pond and skin the swans. No, apparently there is a fabric called Swanskin.

Some enterprising company started manufacturing this stuff for the stated purpose of covering your board or table. It was dyed bright red.

The manufacturers of the time tried to convince women not to use their red cloaks...which apparently was a thing, to cover their boards or tables, assuring them that was a low-class move. They HAD to have the red swanskin covering.

Hard selling women on nonsense since the beginning.


As you can imagine there were now Better Homes and Gardens types of columns and magazines marketed to women, and ironing was discussed on a regular basis. There were varying opinions of what sort of board to use, how long it should be, what you should cover it with, and the best way to get that wrinkle-free look.

Now that women were being told that they had to get a specific type of fabric and board on which to iron, the invention of an object that was specifically for ironing couldn't be far away, and it wasn't.

In 1858 a fellow by the name of W. Vanderberg took out a patent for an "ironing table".

Somewhere around 1861 another dude, Isaac Ronnie Bord of Georgetown, Deleware took out a patent for "an adjustable flat horizon surface that could be used for the pressing of garments, undergarments and bed linens".

This is where Sarah Boone, dressmaker, enters the story.

Sarah realized that the designs of all of the objects available to her were sort of useless in terms of making the activity more efficient. At which point, she designed her own ironing board.

Sarah Boone's Ironing Board

Then, she patented it.

In her application, she wrote that "the purpose of her invention was “to produce a cheap, simple, convenient and highly effective device, particularly adapted to be used in ironing the sleeves and bodies of ladies’ garments.”








Her board was specifically created to make sure that the sleeves could be ironed without any creases.

Sarah Boone was one of three black women in her day who created inventions for the home. Her designs influenced the current ironing boards we have today.

Every single time you open up your handy dandy, easily stored ironing board before that big meeting, or whatever has made you decide you need to look a bit more spiffy, you have Sarah Boone to thank.

For all of you out there who hate ironing...at least you don't have to go run down red swanskin, and it isn't necessary to buy a huge piece of immovable furniture that is dedicated to nothing else aside from "pressing" your garments, undergarments and bed linens.

Thank you, Sarah Boone, for helping us to stay wrinkle-free.

Celebrate Black History Month!

Day 1 - The ABC's of Black History Month

Day 2 - Archie Alphonso Alexander - Mathematician/Engineer

Day 3 - Sarah Boone - Inventor and Domestic Goddess
Day 4 - Charles R. Drew - Blood Man
Day 5 - Mary Beatrice Davidson Kenner - Inventor of The Sanitary Pad

Day 6 - Ernest Everett Just - Biologist, Zoologist, Cell man
Day 7 - Frederick McKinley Jones - The Coolest Man in Modern History

Day 8 - Sarah Goode - A Practical Bed For Small Spaces
Day 9 - William Henry Cling - Did He Invent The Hospital Bed Before Gatch?
Day 10 - Inez Beverly Prosser and Brown V.S. The Board of Education
Day 11 - Jan Ernst Mateliger - Mechanical Engineer/Sole Man
Day 12 - Samuel L. Kountz Jr. - Revolutionized Transplant Surgery
Day 13 - Lewis Howard Latimer - Incandescent Inventor
Day 14 - Marie Van Brittan Brown - Home Security
Day 15 - Norbert Rillieux - Sugar Man
Day 16 - Otis Boykin - He Kept Hearts Beating
Day 17 - Alice H. Parker - Heating It Up!
Day 18 - Lloyd Quarterman - Chemist and Atom Man
Day 19 - Robert F. Flemming Jr. - Guitar Man
Day 20 - Charles S. L. Baker - The Friction Radiator 
Day 21 - Granville T. Woods - The Black Edison
Day 22 - Alfred L. Cralle - Next Time You Have Ice Cream...
Day 23 - Ellen Elgin - Through The Wringer
Day 24 - Dr. Daniel Hale Williams - Holding A Heart In the Palm of His Hands
Day 25 - Benjamin Bradley - Steam Engine Dominance
Day 26 - Elijah McCoy - The Real One
Day 27 - Alexander Miles - Hold The Door, Please!

Day - 2 Archibald Alphonso Alexander - Engineer

Archie Alexander

Archibald (Archie) Alphonso Alexander (1888 - 1958) 

He was an engineer and mathematician. 

Born in Ottumwa, Iowa, 

He attended the University of Iowa and was the first black football player for the team. They called him Alexander the Great.

The professors in the engineering program tried to dissuade Archie from studying the subject. They told him they'd never heard of a black engineer. They told him he would not be successful.   

In 1912 he achieved a BA and became the first black person to graduate from the College of Engineering at the University of Iowa. He was hired as a foreman for an engineering company that built bridges.

In 1917 he opened his own engineering firm. He was 26. A.A, Alexander, Inc. was just the beginning.

He kept his studies in the subject of engineering and mathematics current - even taking courses at the University of London.

He made partnerships with two other engineers, both white, and formed the first interracially owned engineering firm in America.  

In 1929, he partnered with an engineer Maurice A. Repass and changed the company's name from A. A. Alexander Inc, to Alexander & Repass

(I tried to find information about Maurice A Repass, but he has been overshadowed in history, and all the references to him simply refer back to Alexander.)

Alexander stayed with his firm until his death. 

Source

In the 46 years he worked for his engineering company, he built a whole bunch of stuff, Here is some of the most recognizable.

The Whitehurst Freeway in Washington DC.

source

The Tidal Basin Bridge

source

The Tuskegee Airfield.

The job he took most pride in? 

The 1.2 million dollar contract to build the heating and cooling system for the University of Iowa.

In his long career, he designed and built bridges, freeways, apartment buildings, tunnels, office buildings, and railroad trestles all over the USA, in Central America, and the Carribean.

Despite his wealth and prominence, he faced the same racial animus that so many other African Americans have had to deal with.

After fighting laws that prevented him from buying the house he wanted in the neighborhood of his choice, he and his wife woke after their first night in their new home to find a cross burning on their lawn.

He understood the nature of the country in which he lived and the importance of not allowing those in power to oppress everyone else. He understood that only by making America a place of boundless opportunity would we be able to succeed as a nation. 

He told his engineers: “The individual economy must be constantly expanded, with more opportunities for individual initiative and satisfaction. Therefore, we need to develop responsible leaders capable of exercising sound judgment in the face of unprecedented situations. Citizens must learn to spend their leisure time constructively and make mature personal adjustments to the highly complex and divided world. Barriers to equality of opportunity within the community must be eliminated.”

He spent most of his life working to make things better for people of color, and building important, interesting, necessary, and useful things all over the Americas.

No matter where life took him, he kept his headquarters in Des Moines, Iowa.

He was a life long Republican and helped elect Eisenhower. 

Eisenhower appointed him Governor of the United States Virgin Islands in 1954.

He ended up leaving his post in 1958 because of ill health, but he was in trouble because he was under investigation for giving his friends preferential treatment for building contracts.

His works are still with us all over the country. He is a man who should not be forgotten.

-Celebrate Black History

Day 1 - The ABC's of Black History Month

Day 2 - Archie Alphonso Alexander - Mathematician/Engineer

Day 3 - Sarah Boone - Inventor and Domestic Goddess
Day 4 - Charles R. Drew - Blood Man
Day 5 - Mary Beatrice Davidson Kenner - Inventor of The Sanitary Pad

Day 6 - Ernest Everett Just - Biologist, Zoologist, Cell man
Day 7 - Frederick McKinley Jones - The Coolest Man in Modern History

Day 8 - Sarah Goode - A Practical Bed For Small Spaces
Day 9 - William Henry Cling - Did He Invent The Hospital Bed Before Gatch?
Day 10 - Inez Beverly Prosser and Brown V.S. The Board of Education
Day 11 - Jan Ernst Mateliger - Mechanical Engineer/Sole Man
Day 12 - Samuel L. Kountz Jr. - Revolutionized Transplant Surgery
Day 13 - Lewis Howard Latimer - Incandescent Inventor
Day 14 - Marie Van Brittan Brown - Home Security
Day 15 - Norbert Rillieux - Sugar Man
Day 16 - Otis Boykin - He Kept Hearts Beating
Day 17 - Alice H. Parker - Heating It Up!
Day 18 - Lloyd Quarterman - Chemist and Atom Man
Day 19 - Robert F. Flemming Jr. - Guitar Man
Day 20 - Charles S. L. Baker - The Friction Radiator 
Day 21 - Granville T. Woods - The Black Edison
Day 22 - Alfred L. Cralle - Next Time You Have Ice Cream...
Day 23 - Ellen Elgin - Through The Wringer
Day 24 - Dr. Daniel Hale Williams - Holding A Heart In the Palm of His Hands
Day 25 - Benjamin Bradley - Steam Engine Dominance

Day 1 - Black History Month - Why Are We Still Celebrating This?

I don't ever remember celebrating black history month when I was in school. 

I don't ever remember anybody even mentioning it.

I thought it was a pretty new thing, and that was why I hadn't heard of it when I was a kid.

Maybe the schools I attended did celebrate it and it just made no impression on me.

I could not recall ever hearing about this until I was older, and I don't even remember how much older.

When did we start celebrating this?

Why did we start celebrating this?

Who started celebrating this?

How did we even get to a Black History Month?

Here is what I learned.

Carter G Woodson

 The seeds of Black History Month were planted by a historian by the name of Dr. Carter G. Woodson.

He was born in 1875, got a BA from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. from Harvard in history.

He was quite annoyed as a historian, that black folks were missing from American History. The textbooks of the day, as well as all of the scholarly literature, completely erased African Americans from the picture. One would never know that black folks had contributed anything to the American story. 

(I remember only two: George Washington Carver and Martin Luther King Jr. No black women were mentioned, and no other politicians, inventors or anything.) 

Dr. Woodson decided to change that. 

In 1915 he and some of his friends established The Association for the Study of Negro Life and History.

in 1916 the association produced The Journal of Negro History which is still in publication and is now called The Journal of African American History.

source

After publishing the journal for ten years, Dr. Woodson fought for Negro History Week to be held in February. The reason being that Lincoln's birthday was the 12th of February and Fredrick Douglass is accepted to have been born on the 14th of February. 

The whole idea for this week was to encourage Americans to learn something about the contributions of African Americans to the history of our country. Mayors across the country started issuing yearly proclamations about it.

In 1950, Dr. Woodson passed away, but the seeds he'd planted lived beyond him.

In the late1960's during the height of civil disobedience when African Americans were fighting for basic civil rights, some college campuses across the country expanded the idea of Negro History Week to the entire month of February.

Seoul Korea

In 1976, I was in Seoul Korea. Apparently, that was the first year African American History Month was recognized nationally by President Gerald Ford.

President Ford called on the country to “seize the opportunity to honor the too-often neglected accomplishments of black Americans in every area of endeavor throughout our history.”

You might ask...

Do we still need this?

Why is it so important?

Isn't a month a bit excessive?

Doesn't everybody already know that black folks must have done something worthwhile in history?

Well, there is this guy in our government...

Steve King in the House of Representatives in 2016 to illustrate his point that only white people have made significant contributions to civilization said this:

“This whole business does get a little tired. I would ask you to go back through history and figure out where are these contributions that have been made by these other categories of people you are talking about. Where did any other subgroup of people contribute more to civilization?”

The House just called him to the carpet for saying he was uncertain when the term White Nationalist became a bad thing. Yes, he is representing Iowa. The folks in his district have been sending him to Washington for over a decade.

He is not alone in this belief that there has been no significant contribution in our society by POC.

Black History Month is not about forgiveness or an excuse not to teach the actual history of what it has meant to be black in America.

Black history is about taking a moment to remember that our country's history is dynamic and everybody who had ancestors here helped build it even if our textbooks keep forgetting to tell the whole story somehow.

This year I will post once a day about someone who has brought light to the darkness.

- The ABC's of Black History Month.

Day 1 - The ABC's of Black History Month

Day 2 - Archie Alphonso Alexander - Mathematician/Engineer

Day 3 - Sarah Boone - Inventor and Domestic Goddess
Day 4 - Charles R. Drew - Blood Man
Day 5 - Mary Beatrice Davidson Kenner - Inventor of The Sanitary Pad

Day 6 - Ernest Everett Just - Biologist, Zoologist, Cell man
Day 7 - Frederick McKinley Jones - The Coolest Man in Modern History

Day 8 - Sarah Goode - A Practical Bed For Small Spaces
Day 9 - William Henry Cling - Did He Invent The Hospital Bed Before Gatch?
Day 10 - Inez Beverly Prosser and Brown V.S. The Board of Education
Day 11 - Jan Ernst Mateliger - Mechanical Engineer/Sole Man
Day 12 - Samuel L. Kountz Jr. - Revolutionized Transplant Surgery
Day 13 - Lewis Howard Latimer - Incandescent Inventor
Day 14 - Marie Van Brittan Brown - Home Security
Day 15 - Norbert Rillieux - Sugar Man
Day 16 - Otis Boykin - He Kept Hearts Beating
Day 17 - Alice H. Parker - Heating It Up!
Day 18 - Lloyd Quarterman - Chemist and Atom Man
Day 19 - Robert F. Flemming Jr. - Guitar Man
Day 20 - Charles S. L. Baker - The Friction Radiator Day 21 - Day 21 - Granville T. Woods - The Black Edison
Day 22 - Alfred L. Cralle - Next Time You Have Ice Cream...
Day 23 - Ellen Elgin - Through The Wringer
Day 24 - Dr. Daniel Hale Williams - Holding A Heart In the Palm of His Hands
Day 25 - Benjamin Bradley - Steam Engine Dominance
Day 26 - Elijah McCoy - The Real One
Day 27 - Alexander Miles - Hold The Door, Please!

When Murphy Strikes: The Aftermath

source

This has not been a stellar week in the world of storytelling for me. I find myself wondering how children taste if you have the right recipe.

I also wonder about the administrators at some of these schools.

In the last two days, I've been hit by all of the things that make me question whether or not I am the best person to be in schools.

I have no patience.
I am annoyed when administration treats art experiences like a babysitting service.
I am disgusted when teachers spend time surfing the net on their phones during the set and then get upset with their kids when they don't pay attention.
I am annoyed when they leave two special teachers in the room and everyone else leaves, thus encouraging the handful of really defiant kids all over the room to show their worst behavior without there being anybody there who really knows the best way to deal with them.
I hate having to enforce discipline from the stage because nobody is doing it and the kids around the disruptor are having trouble paying attention.
I really hate having to call out a kid who has Pokemon cards or a phone.
I hate seeing the preschoolers file into a show for 3 - 5th graders because they are going to sit and stare at me without a clue in the world about what is happening.

As I said, it has been a rough couple of days.

When things like this happen to me while I'm performing, I stop having fun. The only thing that saves the shows at this point is all of the training I've had over the years. I can get through a story and the kids enjoy it, but they are not getting the best of me, and my attitude by the end is hanging on by the skin of my proverbial teeth.

What happens when Murphy comes to visit me?


My usual fall back position after I leave a show where my body is in a knot because of the circumstances is to decide I was the biggest problem. Somehow, if I had just done SOMETHING different, that would have saved the whole thing. Placing it in my court makes me feel like there is something I can do to deal with the situation better the next time it happens and I start strategizing.

Despite my utter disgust at myself for not giving what I felt was the best possible experience to this school, the kids left saying...

You should be a comedian!
You are really funny!
I loved those stories!

When I'm this disappointed in the overall show, it is hard for me to hear those things. I am too annoyed at myself at not having done a better job at...SOMETHING.

source

First, I reach into my glove box and get a small piece of emergency chocolate. You can put what you want in your glovebox, I try to keep something decadent in there that I wouldn't normally eat. I take a small piece. This prevents me from pulling into the next drive-thru I see and ordering a shake or some other thing I will instantly regret the second I've swilled it down.

Next, I call The David. 

I yell, complain, and generally pout out loud as I drive. He listens and talks me down off of whatever ledge I might be standing on at the moment. Then, he talks to me. He uses his "Baby, be calm" voice.

He tells me about his phone calls, meetings, contracts, politics he has seen, whatever thing the cats have been up to, and any news of our college-aged children he has been saving. He will even tell me dad jokes. 


Whenever I am no longer homicidal, we get off the phone. I put on a playlist and drive home.









When I get here,  I curate my little library.














I get on facebook and waste some time.



I play a couple of games.










I make myself some lovely tea.



















This time of year I make a nice fire....even if it is sixty degrees outside.











And, if it is non-fiction Thursday, which it is, I have to try to write a blog post about something.




So, tomorrow I have another show. No matter how it goes, tomorrow is Friday, so there is that.

Oh, and for those of my friends who are worried that I am cracking, I had amazing shows last weekend and a practically sold out show at the Carolina Theatre last weekend.

It isn't that I am fighting some huge uphill battle and debating the merits of my career.

No, I'm just having a few days when every audience I've seen makes me think I'm doing something wrong.

I think that it is important for artists to have these moments because they remind us that we are on a journey, not at a destination. We are not bulletproof, and we are often defined by the last audience we see!

So, tea, fire, and pampering tonight. Tomorrow? Kindergarten and first grade audiences...at least, that's what they booked. Who knows what it will be when I get there.

Murphy is with me this week. He's a pain, but he doesn't ever stay long.

Enjoy the journey...even the potholes. All of them teach us something.

Happy Telling -

Telling Stories and Literacy: The Things You Don't Usually Get To See

Photo Credit Jonathan Van Ark

I am an unrepentant bibliophile and logophile.

I love words and word games and reading. I could spend months sitting by a lake with a stack of books and little else and I would be in Heaven.

I can't imagine a life without books.

I know, however, that not everyone feels that way about literature.

Apparently, there are people who haven't read a book since college. There are other people who haven't ever read a book at all.

There are lots of reasons why people struggle to read, and those reasons are as varied as the people who have them.

If you are a literacy specialist working in an elementary school, you get to peek into those worlds. Today, because of a very specific set of circumstances, I got to peek into one.

I had three shows at a school today. This basically means I'm there for half a day. I don't do my usual run in, do a couple of sets, and then head out of the building.

The kids in the first couple of assemblies leave me and have time to go do a few other things before I am out the door.

Today was pretty perfect. I had K - 2, 3 - 5, and 6 & 7.

I got to do my traditional sets, and I let the middle school group decide if they wanted the family story I normally tell for the seventh grade or the gory scary set I tell for the sixth. Not surprisingly, I ended up telling Morgan and the Pot of Brains and The Boo Hag. They never pick the family story even if I promise them it is fun and they will love it.

I got to the school at 8:30am and I left at 1:15.

After my last set, I was chatting with the artist liaison. (the person on site who volunteers to babysit me! They make sure the space is set up properly, get my room temperature bottle of water - snacks sometimes - and ask me if I need anything else. They are wonderful. I wish I had one for everything, but alas, the second you leave the school you are once more on your own!)

We were laughing about something as we went down the hall towards the front office. I'd had a chance to see all the kids in the school, and they were shocked to see me walking through the halls like a normal person. They said the usual things:

"I loved that!"
"You are the best storyteller ever!"
"That was amazing."
"You are very good at telling stories."
"Thank you for telling us stories."

As we passed one of the closed doors, a teacher opened it, let a kid out and saw me.
She said, "I am so glad to see you! I have to tell you something."

A kid that she has been working with all year came to see her right after the assembly. The literacy specialist said that this girl has lots of struggles with literacy. She reads the words one at a time with a flat affect, and her comprehension is almost nonexistent.

She said, "I always tell the kids to read with expression, but they never do."

Today, when the girl got to her session, she read the sentence. "The. dog. was. angry." The specialist said, "After she read the sentence she looked at it for a second and she said, "No." she read it again, and this time she made it really dramatic. "The dog was angry!"

 She looked up at me and there was a huge smile on her face. She said, "I have to learn how to read this the right way so I can go home and read it to my parents!"

The specialist said the girl was so excited about the story that she worked on it until she had it so she could read it all the way through with inflection.

"You helped her make a connection between words and stories that I have been unable to get her to do all year. I have never seen her so excited about reading. I just wanted you to know that. You made a difference for her."

One of the bookcases in my kid's rec room

I rarely get that kind of immediate feedback about the work I do.
Normally, I just hope stories clicked with someone.

I walked out of that school today with so much joy. I was so proud of that kid. I don't know who she is. I might never meet her. She may never see me again, but if she keeps hearing the words with emphasis and images...reading could very well go from a struggle to a friend.

Don't ever doubt that what you do makes a difference just because you aren't always there to see it.

Happy Telling -

We Are Our Stories - Nothing More. Nothing Less.

I love doing sets that challenge audiences when I work in schools. I'm always trying to challenge them linguistically and developmentally. I try to challenge their imagination and their assumptions.

We are the sum of the stories we believe, and the stories we reject. We can't incorporate any story into our world view we haven't heard. As a storyteller, I try to expose people to as many stories as I can!

Nobody should be shocked that we are the stories we believe. We start teaching our children the story of who we are, and who we expect them to be as soon as they arrive. We also tell them who everyone else is. 

Sometimes the stories we surround our children with are dark and frightening. Sometimes the stories are light and fun. 

As we go through life, those stories come back to haunt us. They shape what we see and how we interact with people. They close us or open us. We cannot escape them, and often we don't even question them.

Yesterday I was in a school that had an interesting population. They have everything from kids who live in gated communities with million dollar homes, kids who are bussed in from government housing to kids who live on a Reservation. 

I asked the principal if he would like the Trouble set or the Social set. He listened to the descriptions and announced, "Both."

I said, "You have to pick one."

He said, "Both," and started laughing.

So, I split the baby on it. I did part of the Trouble set and part of the Social set.

The kids really enjoyed Brer Possum and the Snake, but they were over the moon for The Debate in Sign Language.

They were shocked at the callousness of the king, the foolishness of his behavior, and his nonsense assertion that the only people who were worth anything were the rich and beautiful. 

They loved the ending, and most of them said it was their favorite story. The teachers who saw me before I left the school felt compelled to tell me that the last story was perfect because of the population of their school. I just nodded. 

Today, I was in a school that I visit every single time I am in the area. I wasn't here last year, and all the teachers let me know that they noted that I didn't come. The principal told me that as soon as they saw my name on the list they booked me this year. It is an arts school, and I have now seen every single kid at that k - 6th school at least once!

With such a seasoned storytelling audience, you can tell interesting stories. So, I broke out Clever Manka.

(The version I tell is not the written one here. It is a compilation of several of these clever girl tales, but this is a good variant of the one I know.)

I begin by telling them that I was potty trained in front of Sesame Street. I explain that I loved Prairie Dawn because she was saying things to girls nobody else was. She said girls were smart, and strong, and capable. I explained that when I was a little girl, most people were telling girls if they were too smart, nobody would ever love them. Smart girls were always shown to be alone, teased, unloved, and every other thing until they stopped trying to be so smart and looked pretty.

"Boys don't make passes at girls who wear glasses."

The kids were shocked that this could have been true. They couldn't imagine it. I asked them what year women got to vote. It took five minutes of guessing before someone finally remembered it was 1920.

I told them that from 1776 to 1920, women in the country had been unable to make decisions that really affected our government. 

I told them that I found out that Prarie Dawn is the first feminist I'd ever met. Being a feminist means that you believe that girls are smart, strong, and capable. If you believe that, then you are a feminist. 

Then, I went into Clever Manka. The refrain I use in that tale?

"Nothing good ever comes of women who are clever!

As I was leaving today, one of the girls turned to me and said, "Girl Power!"

I don't remember what I was thinking about when I was in fourth grade, but I am pretty sure it wasn't girl power.

There are so many stories that tell us that acting with knowledge can change the world for good one decision or action at a time, just as acting in ignorance can destroy beautiful things.

 We change the world and ourselves for good or ill because of the stories we believe and those we reject.

I am just a storyteller. All I can do is try to offer up stories so that we can see each other and ourselves in different ways. 

I want to believe it is possible to see each other and accept that we are not all the same and that is perfectly fine.

Some days I am daunted by that. Today?

Today I had 

Happy Telling.