Photos of children around the world with their most prized possessions; a photo collection by Gabriele Galimberti. Check out the collection HERE.

Alternative Greeting Cards for New Mothers

Check out all ten at ScaryMommy.com

Tom Hanks Toddlers & tiaras video

It's gone viral but the reason I'm posting it is because I've always loathed the sexy toddler/kid stuff. It's a ripe target and Jimmy Kimmel's post-Academy Awards slot has had some great skits. The kid pageants is a big fat target and hanks doesn't miss.

Music Story from Ohio: At an Age for Music and Dreams, Real Life Intrudes

NYT

April 15, 2009
This Land
At an Age for Music and Dreams, Real Life Intrudes
By DAN BARRY

NEWARK, Ohio

Two days before their long-awaited trip to New York City, for many of them a foreign place, the members of the Newark High School Sinfonia noisily gather for rehearsal. The cacophony ends when the first of the first violinists, the best violinist, stands to lead others in tuning to an A.

Her name is Tiffany Clay and she is 18, with light brown hair tied in a ponytail and large eyes that always seem at the edge of tears. She has been on her own, more or less, since she was 16, and the violin in her delicate hands was bought for $175 on eBay by her music teacher.

She is a complicated young woman, says that teacher, and a gifted musician. Consistently at or near the very top of her class. Should be going to a top college, on scholarship. Should be, but won’t be, because she feels a need to make money more than music.

Ms. Clay is a child of her age and place, worried about being laid off, uninterested in and maybe even afraid of imagining a life beyond central Ohio. Newark is what she knows: a pleasant, bifurcated city of 45,000, where concerns about unemployment temper the pride in local public art, and where affluence and poverty sit side-by-side in the classroom.

She once explored the idea of going away to college to become a music teacher. But it just didn’t seem practical: spending four years studying the theory of music, which doesn’t interest her, while here in Newark, the school system is constantly adapting to real and threatened cuts.

Music programs always seem among the first to go, she says. No job security in Tchaikovsky.

So she is maintaining high grades, playing in the orchestra, working 35 hours a week as a Sonic Drive-In carhop, paying $345 a month for the small apartment she shares with an unemployed boyfriend — and planning to study nursing for two years at a technical college in Newark.

“Everybody gets sick,” she says, plotting her future.

Right now, though, she and the other students are rehearsing their string instruments for a high school orchestra competition that will take place in Lincoln Center. Soon the chatter of teenagers in a mostly empty school auditorium surrenders to the music of the masters.

“Listen,” says their teacher, Susan Larson, her baton paused in mid-sway. “Listen.”

Ms. Larson, 43, the Newark school system’s music director for the past three years, faces challenges beyond those presented on sheets of music. The city’s voters keep rejecting raises in the tax levy, forcing cuts in school programs, including music. Parents now pay $55 for a child to participate in activities like this orchestra, and $200 to play sports; if next month’s proposed levy is defeated, Ms. Larson doubts that the orchestra, for one, will survive.

When she struggles to pay for repairs to instruments, many of which are long-ago hand-me-downs from another school district, she recalls her 15 years as the music director in Bexley, a more affluent city where her budget was nowhere near as tight. She vividly remembers the Bexley student who celebrated graduation by smashing a $10,000 violin — his spare.

She cried then; it hurts more now.

Here in Newark, half the students are poor enough to receive lunch free or at a discount. The system also has one of the highest dropout rates in Ohio; nearly a third of the high school students do not graduate. That elevated percentage seems out of place given the Middle America setting, but officials have a theory:

Back in the day, you could drop out and still get a good job at one of the many manufacturing plants in town. You could pay the mortgage, buy a car new, take holiday trips — all without a high school diploma.

“Now those jobs have gone away,” says Keith Richards, the city’s schools superintendent. “But the mindset has not.”

Mayor Bob Diebold, 48, who grew up here, agrees. “You could walk out of school and get a job,” he says. “You can’t do that anymore.”

Actually, you can — only those jobs are more likely to be at McDonald’s and not, say, at the Owens Corning fiberglass plant, for generations a vital part of the Newark economy. Nine years ago the plant employed about 1,500; now, fewer than 700.

Rehearsal ends and the young musicians flee, a few in cars driven by parents. Ms. Clay, though, drives her 1998 Chevy Malibu to wash clothes for her New York trip at the Colonial Coin Laundry, then heads to her home in a weathered apartment complex — the unit, she says, “right next to the Dumpster.”

The apartment contains little more than bed, television and couch, now occupied by her boyfriend, Trevor Scanlon, who dropped out of high school but says he’s working on his graduate-equivalency diploma. Slinking about is their cat, Easy Mac, named after a macaroni and cheese that you microwave.

The short life story Ms. Clay tells is of an adulthood come too soon, of parents splitting up when she was young, of a mother gone to another city, of a father, an electrician, dogged by employment uncertainties. She and her father clashed so often, she says, that she moved out at 16, got a job and tried to figure out life — rent, work, school, some health issues — on her own.

She returned after a year but left again several months later, for good, though she is in touch with her parents, and talks often of wanting to be around in case they ever need her.

While working full time at the Sonic, she has also maintained superior grades, taken several Advanced Placement courses and distanced herself from classmates. She bristles when some of them talk of what they have spent at the Easton Town Center mall — “That’s a month’s rent,” she wants to say — but at the same time she admits to feeling jealous: “I want — that!”

Now wearing a yellow Sonic golf shirt and a Tiffany C. nameplate, Ms. Clay leaves to make $7.35 an hour, plus tips; it will be a long night. “Kids are in school during the week,” she explains. “They leave at 9, and I stay until after 11.”

Soon she is gliding on roller skates beneath neon reds and yellows that grow more garish as dusk descends. Spinning, speeding, stopping with effortless grace, she balances plastic trays of sweet and greasy food with those delicate hands. Her mastery of yet another world, this Sonic world, means she is again employee of the month, entitling her to a month of free meals.

And the lyrics of her night songs are:

“All right, I’ve got your three junior chili cheese wraps, a B.L.T., chicken strip sandwich, extra long Coney and a mozzarella stick. And a kid’s hot dog meal and kid’s hamburger meal, one with a grape slush, the other with a Powerade slush.”

Two mornings later, buses whisk the Newark High School Sinfonia and its entourage to New York: Austin Modesitt, 16, violinist, who has never left Ohio, but whose mother, a factory worker, contributed her tax-refund check; Jessica Kunasek, 17, violinist, whose older siblings chipped in to pay her way; other students, who sold chocolate, washed cars, held a spaghetti dinner — anything to cover the cost of $850 a student.

Now it is Sunday. They have spent three days in a Manhattan wonderland, but the time has come to compete for something called the National Orchestra Cup. They file into the just-renovated Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center and put on their school-owned tuxedos and gowns.

A few of the invited high schools had to decline; the recession, organizers explain. But others, from Ohio and California, New York and Indiana, have made it, and their instruments, at least in Ms. Larson’s estimation, are of higher quality.

Newark is the last to perform, following a symphony orchestra — with strings, brass, winds, percussion and a harp — from Carmel, Ind., where the median household income is nearly three times that in Newark. The Carmel students seem at home in Lincoln Center; they play exquisitely.

The Newark students take the stage, led by concertmaster Tiffany Clay and trailed by director Susan Larson. First, a toccata by Frescobaldi. Then a cello duet by Vivaldi, sweetly rendered by juniors Bryn Wilkin and Alex Van Atta. Finally, the first movement of Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings.

Soon there come sounds just beyond articulation, of sorrow and joy and wonder, summoned from wood and string by the children of Newark, Ohio. And Ms. Clay, at the front of the stage, disappears into the music.

Enchanted by Pachelbel as a child, given free lessons by a teacher who recognized her talent, blessed with the gift of musical sight reading, Ms. Clay has not been as fortunate with other parts of her young life. Her worries are not about prom dresses but about family, and rent, and employment.

Soon, these students will be back in Newark, proud of tying for first runner-up, behind that orchestra from Carmel. And Ms. Clay will be back at the Sonic, spinning her wheels, singing her song of limeades and cheeseburgers, easy on the mayo. After that, nursing, probably.

What role music will play in her life, she doesn’t know. But for now, at least, she is on a New York stage, wearing a borrowed black gown, playing a borrowed eBay violin, and Tchaikovsky holds her.

Book: "Hip Hop Speaks to Children"

NYT
November 8, 2008
Child’s Garden of Hip-Hop (for Mom to Love, Too)
By MOTOKO RICH

By now, hip-hop has become a mainstream part of the cultural landscape for children on shows like “Sesame Street,” “Yo Gabba Gabba!” on Nickelodeon and “Choo-Choo Soul” and “Handy Manny” on the Disney Channel. But when Rona Brinlee, a bookseller in Atlantic Beach, Fla., first heard about “Hip Hop Speaks to Children,” an illustrated anthology of poems and song lyrics, she worried that prospective buyers might shy away.

With previous volumes of poetry for children, she had noticed that the books were popular among grandparents looking for gifts. “I didn’t know if these same loving grandparents were going to say, ‘Wow, hip-hop,’ ” said Ms. Brinlee, who owns the BookMark, an independent bookstore. “Because some are going to make assumptions that this is violent, or they just don’t know anything about it.”

Ms. Brinlee quickly sold out of the initial six copies she stocked, and she has 10 more on order. “I’m thrilled to say that I was wrong,” she said.

“Hip Hop Speaks to Children: A Celebration of Poetry With a Beat,” which features lyrics by Mos Def, Kanye West and Queen Latifah, as well as poems by Maya Angelou and Gwendolyn Brooks, has become a modest hit, rising to No. 3 among picture books on The New York Times children’s best-Seller list last Sunday .

One of the selling points of the book, which was edited by the poet Nikki Giovanni, is that it comes with a CD of recordings by many of the poets and artists performing their work, including an excerpt from A Tribe Called Quest’s “Ham ’N’ Eggs” and “Dream Variations,” by Langston Hughes. The book and CD conclude with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, followed by a hip-hop interpretation of the speech by Ms. Giovanni and the performers Oni Lasana and Val Gray Ward.

“We wanted to connect some dots, but in a very light way,” said Ms. Giovanni, who contributed three poems to the book, as well as an introduction. “I wanted to find that hip-hop voice that allows children to enter it, because they are listening to it anyway.”

Ms. Giovanni said she also wanted to reach back to what she sees as the roots of hip-hop in older poems by mainly African-American poets, like Hughes or Paul Laurence Dunbar, as well as to use the familiar vernacular of hip-hop to lure children to more established literary voices.

“I wanted them to see that there are, for lack of a better word, some train tracks with stops and stations along the way,” Ms. Giovanni said. “If you like Queen Latifah and ‘Ladies First,’ you’re going to love Langston Hughes and ‘Dream Boogie.’ ”

For that reason teachers and librarians have welcomed the book. “This is poetry in a form that really appeals to them,” Diane Chen, the librarian at John F. Kennedy Middle School in Nashville, said of her students. Ms. Chen said she played the CD regularly in the library and had ordered 15 copies of the book for the school.

While hip-hop has become ubiquitous on the radio and on television, its verbal component is increasingly embraced as a literary form. “There is a growing sensibility that is recognizing that hip-hop is where poetry lives today in so many ways,” said Adam Bradley, assistant professor of African-American literature at Claremont McKenna College in California, who is an editor of a coming anthology of rap lyrics for Yale University Press.

Professor Bradley added that for children, hip-hop was a natural way to learn the basics of poetry. “The kinds of word games that children naturally create really mirror hip-hop in its most basic forms,” he said.

Ms. Giovanni has been doing readings at bookstores and schools since the book came out early last month. Politics and Prose, an independent bookstore in Washington, hosted an event for about 225 students. “Every school in the area was calling to see if they could come and bring their kids,” said Dara La Porte, manager of the store’s children’s and young adult department. “Schools are really looking for a way to interest kids in poetry. This is their poetry, and Nikki knows that.”

Barnes & Noble has selected the book as one it will feature on picture-book walls in the children’s departments of all its stores throughout November and December in the hopes that it will be a popular holiday gift. Sales could be difficult, though. As Leonard S. Riggio, the chief executive of Barnes & Noble, recently warned in an internal memo, the chain was “bracing for a terrible holiday season” over all.

The book is the second foray into poetry for children by Sourcebooks, a small independent publisher in Chicago. Three years ago the company had a best seller with “Poetry Speaks to Children,” a collection of favorites by the likes of Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, Emily Dickinson and Ms. Giovanni, who contributed four poems. That volume also came with a CD and featured historic recordings by poets like Frost and Sandburg.

Dominique Raccah, who withdrew $17,000 from a 401(k) retirement account to found Sourcebooks 21 years ago, started out publishing books for the financial services industry. In 2001 the company moved into poetry with “Poetry Speaks: Hear Great Poets Read Their Work From Tennyson to Plath,” a book-and-three-CD package for adults.

Although Ms. Raccah said that each of the company’s previous books of poetry had sold more than 150,000 copies, she said the publisher had difficulty persuading booksellers to take on many copies of “Hip Hop Speaks to Children.”

According to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks about 70 percent of sales, the book has now sold about 3,000 copies. Ms. Raccah said that figure did not account for sales in some African-American bookstores or at group events. She added that there were now about 25,000 copies in bookstores.

Both the publisher and Ms. Giovanni are hopeful that the anthology will have quiet traction. For her part, Ms. Giovanni said she believed the book would help counteract persistent negative images of hip-hop.

“I just didn’t want to see it hijacked by half-naked girls and boys doing bling-bling,” she said. “I just wanted to try to help remind youngsters out there that this is a good expression.”

Drug Killings Haunt Mexican Schoolchildren

One can only imagine the longterm effects.


NYT
[see original post for images and audio supplement]

October 20, 2008
Drug Killings Haunt Mexican Schoolchildren
By MARC LACEY

TIJUANA, Mexico — The little boy, his school uniform neatly pressed and his friends gathered around, held up 10 little fingers, each one representing a dead body he said he saw outside his school one recent morning. He was not finished, though. He put down the 10 fingers and then put up 2 more. Twelve bodies in all.

“They chopped out the tongues,” the boy said, seemingly fascinated by what he saw at the mass-killing scene outside Valentín Gómez Farías Primary School three weeks ago.

“I saw the blood,” offered a classmate, enthusiastically.

“They were tied,” piped in another.

Mexico’s explosion of drug-related violence has caught the attention of the country’s children. Experts say the atrocities that young people are hearing about, and all too frequently witnessing, are hardening them, traumatizing them, filling their heads with images that are hard to shake.

“Unfortunately, with this wave of drug violence, there’s been collateral damage among children,” said Jorge Álvarez Martínez, a professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico who specializes in post-traumatic stress. Such exposure to violence can hinder learning, interrupt sleep and linger for years, he said.

Nowhere is the trauma greater than along the border with the United States, where drug cartels are battling one another for a growing domestic market and the lucrative transit routes north. In Tijuana alone, a wave of gangland killings has left at least 99 people dead since Sept. 26, a death toll that rivals, if not exceeds, that in Baghdad, a war-torn city that is four times as large, over the same period.

Across Mexico, the carnage is impossible to hide, with severed heads and decapitated bodies turning up, sometimes nearly a dozen at a time. There have been more than 3,700 killings related to drugs and organized crime this year, up from about 2,700 last year, the Mexican attorney general’s office said early last week, with Chihuahua the most violent state and the killings continuing in the days since.

Exchanging gruesome stories is nothing new for schoolchildren, who have a way of overstating their brushes with danger. But the 12 tortured, tongueless bodies that were the talk of the playground recently were no exaggeration. In the early hours of Sept. 29, the bodies of 11 men and one woman, bound and partly dressed, were found in an abandoned lot opposite the school.

The headmaster, Miguel Ángel González Tovar, canceled classes soon after the bodies were discovered, but that did not stop some students from getting a glimpse of them and many others from hearing about them.

“There’s no doubt these images affect the children,” said Mr. González, who recently met with government psychologists to plan counseling sessions with the students. “Some of them are very quiet now. Some are asking us, ‘Why did they die?’ ”

And the bodies dumped outside the school are only one of several macabre displays, forcing teachers to compete with the killers for the attention of Mexico’s youth.

Indeed, it is hard to find a student here who does not know some of the gruesome details of recent killings, like the several vats of acid that were found outside a seafood restaurant, containing what the authorities said they believed were human remains. Or the two bodies wrapped in what resembled cellophane that were found near a road sign that said, “Thank you for visiting Tijuana.”

Bodies have been hung from bridges, sliced into pieces, decapitated, burned.

Mr. González’s biggest fear is that the awful scenes playing out across much of Mexico are so common that they will eventually lose their shock value among the young, making killing an expected, even acceptable, part of life.

“They may grow up with this sort of thing being normal,” he said. “They can say, ‘I saw 12! How many did you see?’ You could never have imagined this years ago.”

Youngsters today already know the names of the drug traffickers, not just from the nightly news but also from popular songs that extol them as heroes and from the Internet, where the grisly homicide scenes can often be watched on YouTube.

In Tijuana, the leader of the Arellano Félix drug cartel is Fernando Sánchez Arellano, a nephew of the group’s founders who goes by the nickname the Engineer. The authorities say they believe the outburst of killings here is the work of rival traffickers trying to seize control of his turf.

That explains the note found propped up on the dozen bodies outside the school: “This is what happens to anyone associated with the loudmouth Engineer.”

Mexico’s government has sent soldiers to trouble spots throughout the country to reinforce embattled local law enforcement agencies and in some cases root out corruption in their midst. But the drug traffickers have proved better armed in many cases and hard to contain. They are not just violent but also sadistic in their killing methods, and they seem intent on showing off their latest killings, to young and old alike.

“They are sending some kind of perverse message,” Mr. González speculated on why the 12 bodies were dumped near the front gate of his school. “They want attention, and they know leaving bodies in front of a school has impact. Now we’re worried that at any school at any time a body could turn up.”

This month, just before a high school was letting out, the police were on the scene of another killing, this time a barrel containing the body of a man whose arms and legs had been severed. The body, which had been left near the first-base line of a popular amateur baseball league field not far from the school, was whisked away by the authorities to the overflowing morgue before any students came upon it.

But it is not always possible to keep the drug violence hidden from young people.

In January, for instance, the police and soldiers engaged in a three-hour gun battle with narcotics traffickers from the Arellano Félix cartel in a residential neighborhood of Tijuana, requiring several schools to evacuate their students. Heavily armed police officers carried crying children to safety as other law enforcement officers crept along the sidewalk with guns drawn.

By the time the shooting quieted, six presumed traffickers had been killed.

“It was awful,” said Gloria I. Rico, director of the Garden of Happy Children, a preschool that was forced to evacuate. “Even when it was over and we tried to return to normal, any little sound would make the children jump.”

When a prison riot broke out here in September, and there was another eruption of gunfire, teachers at the preschool tried to distract the youngsters. “We told them they were fireworks,” Ms. Rico said, since independence celebrations had just taken place. “We said, ‘Don’t worry,’ but they were still anxious.”

On Wednesday afternoon, another shootout forced yet another Tijuana school to evacuate. This time it was Secondary School 25 that called off classes midway through the day and quickly emptied its classrooms in a panic. “It’s terrible what’s happening in Tijuana,” said Antonio Ochoa Pastrán, the headmaster. “It’s sad that now even in school children aren’t safe.”

Many children, Ms. Rico said, now associate anyone in uniform with violence, which is not an absurd proposition, not only because they may be fighting the traffickers, but also because many law enforcement officers around the country are on the traffickers’ payroll. “The children see the police and they are scared,” Ms. Rico said. “They fear that there is going to be more shooting.”

And there probably will be, which prompts parents to watch their children more closely than ever.

“You don’t know if he goes out if he’s going to come back,” said Patricia Beltrán, who looked on as her 8-year-old son, Marco Antonio, played near the spot where a killing had taken place, the blood still visible in the dirt.

Such fear is not misplaced, because innocent youngsters have been caught in the cross-fire. In addition, most of the victims are under 30 because the cartels use young gunmen to protect their merchandise and enforce discipline, the authorities say.

And given the extensive and often graphic media coverage of the killings, parents say it is impossible to shield their children psychologically.

“My kids are dreaming about this,” said Laura Leticia Quezada, who has three children at the primary school near where the bodies were dumped. “They watch it on the news, and they know every last detail.”

Jorge Fregoso, a television reporter, spends his days hustling from one homicide scene to another and then rushing back to the studio to put it all on the air. The father of two children, he says he understands the concern of many parents and tries to avoid extremely graphic images.

But at the same time, he said, reporting the awful events presses the authorities to take action and to make the streets safer.

“It’s hard for children not to know what’s going on,” he said. “You can turn off the TV all the time and hide the radio and newspaper. They’re still going to hear the bullets. And they might see a shooting themselves.”

Race and Ethnicity: The Doll Test: ‘Which doll is the bad doll?’

See MSNBC for the video and discussion of the doll test
Video: ‘Which doll is the bad doll?’
April 11: The "Conversation About Race" panel talks about the "doll test" — black children's stunning answers when comparing black and white dolls — and how society can begin to correct deep-seated self-esteem problems within the African-American community. Watch the video

The Wire's ghetto "Goodnight Moon"

There are lots of blog discussions about the final scene in HBO's The Wire season 5, episode 7 ("Took"), especially on the HBO message board for the series. Screenwriter Richard Price apparently lifted the passage from his novel Clockers at the request of producer David Simon. If you remember Goodnight Moon from your childhood or, more likely (and like me), you've read it to your own children, it is a beautiful intersection of your own life and the gritty realism of this great television show.

Detective Kima Greggs to her weekends-only adopted son Elijah, sitting at window past bedtime, looking out upon a restive, active Baltimore street:


Kima: Let's say goodnight to everybody. Goodnight moon...
Elijah: Goodnight moon...

Kima: Goodnight stars...
Elijah: Goodnight stars...

Kima: Goodnight po-pos...
Elijah: Goodnight po-pos...

Kima: Goodnight fiends...
Elijah: Goodnight fiends...

Kima:Goodnight hoppers...
Elijah: Goodnight hoppers...

Kima: Goodnight hustlers...
Elijah: Goodnight hustlers...

Kima: Goodnight scammers...
Elijah: Goodnight scammers...

Kima: Goodnight to everybody...
Elijah: Goodnight to everybody...

Kima: Goodnight to one and all...
Elijah: Goodnight to one and all.

Writes Alan Sepinwall (if you know the characters of the show):

"[I]t fits perfectly into this episode, as the show throws its support behind Gus' "This ain't Beirut" argument with Klebanow and Whiting. A carpet-bagging, myopic writer like Templeton looks at Baltimore as a blighted, war-torn city that's beyond salvation, where a Baltimore native like Gus or Kima looks on it as a messed-up place that's still, as Gus says, "Our f--kin' city."

If Templeton had a kid and tried to do "Goodnight Moon" for him in the middle of the night and then heard street activity outside his window, he'd likely slam the window shut and try to distract the kid from all that scary noise. What Kima does -- what "The Wire" consistently and brilliantly does -- is to incorporate the unfortunate sights and sounds outside the window into a larger view of the world, which is the world Elijah will grow up in. Yes, the drug culture is tragic and a blight on society, but it exists, and it affects Kima and will affect Elijah one day -- and, frankly, Kima has affection for certain elements of it. (Bubbles, for one.) You can be afraid of the world outside your window, you can demonize it and mythologize it and try to win awards from it, or you can confront it head on and maybe even find a way to make it seem less scary for the little boy in your arms."



I miss the show already.

UPDATE 2010
Finally found a low quality clip; let's see how long this stays up (fair use for purposes of criticism and evaluation):

Opera Outreach to the Young at the Met

New York Times
January 1, 2007
An Opera at the Met That’s Real and ‘Loud’
By ANTHONY TOMMASINI

Even before the Metropolitan Opera’s Saturday matinee of Mozart’s “Magic Flute” began, this family-friendly version of Julie Taymor’s 2004 production looked to be a huge success. Children were everywhere, a rare sight at the venerable institution. They were having pictures taken in front of the house, dashing up and down the stairs of the Grand Promenade and, before long, sitting up in their seats all over the auditorium.

Peter Gelb, the Met’s new general manager, whose multifaceted outreach efforts have already become a model for opera companies everywhere, has rightly stated that the major impediment to making this art form accessible to children is that most operas are simply too long. So besides translating the text from German into English, the solution here was to cut the production, which normally lasts 3 hours 10 minutes, down to 100 minutes without an intermission.

Actually the matinee clocked in at close to two hours, but few of the children seemed to mind. The audience was remarkably attentive and well behaved. Of course one strict Met protocol — if you leave the auditorium, you are not allowed re-entry until intermission — was wisely ditched for the day, so children could take restroom breaks.

Shortening the score involved what must have been painstaking decisions. The overture and several entire arias and ensembles were cut. Other arias were abridged through some very deft trims. Otherwise the Met went all out. The cast was excellent, and James Levine conducted.

The very free English translation by the poet J. D. McClatchy was clever and singable. Papageno, still without a girlfriend and miserable, asks forlornly: “Is my face just one big puddle? Aren’t I cute enough to cuddle?”

The Papageno, Nathan Gunn, was certainly cute enough. This dynamic baritone exuded charm and cavorted about the stage like an acrobat. At one point he tried to flee danger by scurrying up the side of a huge plastic tube he was trapped in, only to slide back down, landing with the floppy-limbed aplomb of a Charlie Chaplin. He seemed the darling of every child in attendance (and the audience included Mr. Gunn’s five).

The stupendous bass René Pape was Sarastro. A lovely, clear-voiced lyric soprano, Ying Huang, in her debut role at the Met, was an alluring Pamina. Matthew Polenzani brought his sweet tenor voice and wholesome appeal to Prince Tamino. The agile coloratura soprano Erika Miklosa was a vocally fearless and aptly chilling Queen of the Night. As the wicked Monostatos, the trim tenor Greg Fedderly was unrecognizable with his flabby, fake pot belly, which induced giggles every time he exposed it.

I am on record as being no fan of Ms. Taymor’s production, which to me is a mishmash of imagery, so cluttered with puppets, flying objects and fire-breathing statues that it overwhelms Mozart’s music. But this show was not presented with me in mind. So let me offer the reactions of three young attendees. Amitav Mitra, my neighbor, who is 8, came as my guest. And Kira and Jonah Newmark, 9 and 7, the children of friends, were also glad to share their critiques afterwards.

For Amitav, this was his first opera. Though Jonah had seen opera videos at home with his sister, he too was trying the real thing for the first time. Kira, a burgeoning opera buff, has attended, as she put it, “real three-hour operas,” most recently “The Barber of Seville” at the New York City Opera.

Not surprisingly Ms. Taymor’s fanciful sets, costumes and puppets won raves from this trio of critics. But their most revealing comments were about the singing and the story.

The singing “was loud,” Amitav said. Jonah added, “It was too loud.” Kira more or less agreed. I pressed them about this. Today, when children hear amplified music everywhere, often channeled right into their ears through headphones, how could unamplified singing seem too loud?

Amitav clarified their reactions when he said that the singing was “too loud for human voices,” adding, “I never thought voices could do that.”

So their reaction was not a complaint about excessive volume, but rather an attempt to explain the awesome impression made by Ms. Miklosa’s dazzlingly high vocal flights as the Queen of the Night, or Mr. Pape’s unearthly powerful bass voice, or the amassed chorus in the temple scenes. It takes a while for young opera neophytes to adjust to such mind-boggling voices, to realize that this strange, unamplified “loudness” is actually amazing.

The other common reaction concerned the story, which all three children enjoyed. Kira, though, was struck by the gravity of Prince Tamino’s dilemma. “Tamino was a little too serious for me,” she said, adding: “He never does anything that’s funny. He takes things seriously.”

I think Mr. Levine, who conducted a glowing and elegant performance, would be pleased by Kira’s reaction. Mr. Levine made certain that some of the opera’s most somber episodes were included, like the long scene in which the confused Tamino is confronted by the austere Speaker (David Pittsinger), a stalwart member of Sarastro’s brotherhood, at the entrance to the temple.

Like most fairy tales “The Magic Flute” is a mysterious story of good and evil. Naturally, Ms. Taymor’s production makes the opera’s monsters quite charming, like the puppet bears who are enchanted by Tamino’s magic flute. And the boys singing the kindly Three Spirits (Bennett Kosma, Jesse Burnside Murray and Jacob A. Wade) are turned spectral and eerie, with their bodies painted white and Methuselah beards.

This “Magic Flute” was the first Met opera that was transmitted live in high-definition video to some 100 movie theaters around the world. Ultimately the point of this technological outreach is to entice newcomers into attending opera performances. The children I spoke with are likely to be back.

Summarizing his reactions to “The Magic Flute,” Jonah said, “I don’t think it’s going to be the best opera I’m going to go to in my life.” What he meant, explaining further, was, “I’m, like, going to go to others that will be even better.”

The shortened “Magic Flute” repeats today, tomorrow and Thursday at 1 p.m.; (212) 362-6000 or metopera.org. Performances are sold out, but returns may be available.

1980s demo of Fairlight on Sesame Street

It's another YouTube moment!
While we are on the theme of 80s technology, here's a classic demo of the Fairlight keyboard that Herbie Hancock did on Sesame Street in the early 80s:

What’s Wrong With Cinderella?

New York Times

December 24, 2006

What’s Wrong With Cinderella?

By PEGGY ORENSTEIN

I finally came unhinged in the dentist’s office — one of those ritzy pediatric practices tricked out with comic books, DVDs and arcade games — where I’d taken my 3-year-old daughter for her first exam. Until then, I’d held my tongue. I’d smiled politely every time the supermarket-checkout clerk greeted her with “Hi, Princess”; ignored the waitress at our local breakfast joint who called the funny-face pancakes she ordered her “princess meal”; made no comment when the lady at Longs Drugs said, “I bet I know your favorite color” and handed her a pink balloon rather than letting her choose for herself. Maybe it was the dentist’s Betty Boop inflection that got to me, but when she pointed to the exam chair and said, “Would you like to sit in my special princess throne so I can sparkle your teeth?” I lost it.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” I snapped. “Do you have a princess drill, too?”

She stared at me as if I were an evil stepmother.

“Come on!” I continued, my voice rising. “It’s 2006, not 1950. This is Berkeley, Calif. Does every little girl really have to be a princess?”

My daughter, who was reaching for a Cinderella sticker, looked back and forth between us. “Why are you so mad, Mama?” she asked. “What’s wrong with princesses?”

•

Diana may be dead and Masako disgraced, but here in America, we are in the midst of a royal moment. To call princesses a “trend” among girls is like calling Harry Potter a book. Sales at Disney Consumer Products, which started the craze six years ago by packaging nine of its female characters under one royal rubric, have shot up to $3 billion, globally, this year, from $300 million in 2001. There are now more than 25,000 Disney Princess items. “Princess,” as some Disney execs call it, is not only the fastest-growing brand the company has ever created; they say it is on its way to becoming the largest girls’ franchise on the planet.

Meanwhile in 2001, Mattel brought out its own “world of girl” line of princess Barbie dolls, DVDs, toys, clothing, home décor and myriad other products. At a time when Barbie sales were declining domestically, they became instant best sellers. Shortly before that, Mary Drolet, a Chicago-area mother and former Claire’s and Montgomery Ward executive, opened Club Libby Lu, now a chain of mall stores based largely in the suburbs in which girls ages 4 to 12 can shop for “Princess Phones” covered in faux fur and attend “Princess-Makeover Birthday Parties.” Saks bought Club Libby Lu in 2003 for $12 million and has since expanded it to 87 outlets; by 2005, with only scant local advertising, revenues hovered around the $46 million mark, a 53 percent jump from the previous year. Pink, it seems, is the new gold.

Even Dora the Explorer, the intrepid, dirty-kneed adventurer, has ascended to the throne: in 2004, after a two-part episode in which she turns into a “true princess,” the Nickelodeon and Viacom consumer-products division released a satin-gowned “Magic Hair Fairytale Dora,” with hair that grows or shortens when her crown is touched. Among other phrases the bilingual doll utters: “Vámonos! Let’s go to fairy-tale land!” and “Will you brush my hair?”

As a feminist mother — not to mention a nostalgic product of the Grranimals era — I have been taken by surprise by the princess craze and the girlie-girl culture that has risen around it. What happened to William wanting a doll and not dressing your cat in an apron? Whither Marlo Thomas? I watch my fellow mothers, women who once swore they’d never be dependent on a man, smile indulgently at daughters who warble “So This Is Love” or insist on being called Snow White. I wonder if they’d concede so readily to sons who begged for combat fatigues and mock AK-47s.

More to the point, when my own girl makes her daily beeline for the dress-up corner of her preschool classroom — something I’m convinced she does largely to torture me — I worry about what playing Little Mermaid is teaching her. I’ve spent much of my career writing about experiences that undermine girls’ well-being, warning parents that a preoccupation with body and beauty (encouraged by films, TV, magazines and, yes, toys) is perilous to their daughters’ mental and physical health. Am I now supposed to shrug and forget all that? If trafficking in stereotypes doesn’t matter at 3, when does it matter? At 6? Eight? Thirteen?

On the other hand, maybe I’m still surfing a washed-out second wave of feminism in a third-wave world. Maybe princesses are in fact a sign of progress, an indication that girls can embrace their predilection for pink without compromising strength or ambition; that, at long last, they can “have it all.” Or maybe it is even less complex than that: to mangle Freud, maybe a princess is sometimes just a princess. And, as my daughter wants to know, what’s wrong with that?

•

The rise of the Disney princesses reads like a fairy tale itself, with Andy Mooney, a former Nike executive, playing the part of prince, riding into the company on a metaphoric white horse in January 2000 to save a consumer-products division whose sales were dropping by as much as 30 percent a year. Both overstretched and underfocused, the division had triggered price wars by granting multiple licenses for core products (say, Winnie-the-Pooh undies) while ignoring the potential of new media. What’s more, Disney films like “A Bug’s Life” in 1998 had yielded few merchandising opportunities — what child wants to snuggle up with an ant?

It was about a month after Mooney’s arrival that the magic struck. That’s when he flew to Phoenix to check out his first “Disney on Ice” show. “Standing in line in the arena, I was surrounded by little girls dressed head to toe as princesses,” he told me last summer in his palatial office, then located in Burbank, and speaking in a rolling Scottish burr. “They weren’t even Disney products. They were generic princess products they’d appended to a Halloween costume. And the light bulb went off. Clearly there was latent demand here. So the next morning I said to my team, ‘O.K., let’s establish standards and a color palette and talk to licensees and get as much product out there as we possibly can that allows these girls to do what they’re doing anyway: projecting themselves into the characters from the classic movies.’ ”

Mooney picked a mix of old and new heroines to wear the Pantone pink No. 241 corona: Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Ariel, Belle, Jasmine, Mulan and Pocahontas. It was the first time Disney marketed characters separately from a film’s release, let alone lumped together those from different stories. To ensure the sanctity of what Mooney called their individual “mythologies,” the princesses never make eye contact when they’re grouped: each stares off in a slightly different direction as if unaware of the others’ presence.

It is also worth noting that not all of the ladies are of royal extraction. Part of the genius of “Princess” is that its meaning is so broadly constructed that it actually has no meaning. Even Tinker Bell was originally a Princess, though her reign didn’t last. “We’d always debate over whether she was really a part of the Princess mythology,” Mooney recalled. “She really wasn’t.” Likewise, Mulan and Pocahontas, arguably the most resourceful of the bunch, are rarely depicted on Princess merchandise, though for a different reason. Their rustic garb has less bling potential than that of old-school heroines like Sleeping Beauty. (When Mulan does appear, she is typically in the kimonolike hanfu, which makes her miserable in the movie, rather than her liberated warrior’s gear.)

The first Princess items, released with no marketing plan, no focus groups, no advertising, sold as if blessed by a fairy godmother. To this day, Disney conducts little market research on the Princess line, relying instead on the power of its legacy among mothers as well as the instant-read sales barometer of the theme parks and Disney Stores. “We simply gave girls what they wanted,” Mooney said of the line’s success, “although I don’t think any of us grasped how much they wanted this. I wish I could sit here and take credit for having some grand scheme to develop this, but all we did was envision a little girl’s room and think about how she could live out the princess fantasy. The counsel we gave to licensees was: What type of bedding would a princess want to sleep in? What kind of alarm clock would a princess want to wake up to? What type of television would a princess like to see? It’s a rare case where you find a girl who has every aspect of her room bedecked in Princess, but if she ends up with three or four of these items, well, then you have a very healthy business.”

Every reporter Mooney talks to asks some version of my next question: Aren’t the Princesses, who are interested only in clothes, jewelry and cadging the handsome prince, somewhat retrograde role models?

“Look,” he said, “I have friends whose son went through the Power Rangers phase who castigated themselves over what they must’ve done wrong. Then they talked to other parents whose kids had gone through it. The boy passes through. The girl passes through. I see girls expanding their imagination through visualizing themselves as princesses, and then they pass through that phase and end up becoming lawyers, doctors, mothers or princesses, whatever the case may be.”

Mooney has a point: There are no studies proving that playing princess directly damages girls’ self-esteem or dampens other aspirations. On the other hand, there is evidence that young women who hold the most conventionally feminine beliefs — who avoid conflict and think they should be perpetually nice and pretty — are more likely to be depressed than others and less likely to use contraception. What’s more, the 23 percent decline in girls’ participation in sports and other vigorous activity between middle and high school has been linked to their sense that athletics is unfeminine. And in a survey released last October by Girls Inc., school-age girls overwhelmingly reported a paralyzing pressure to be “perfect”: not only to get straight A’s and be the student-body president, editor of the newspaper and captain of the swim team but also to be “kind and caring,” “please everyone, be very thin and dress right.” Give those girls a pumpkin and a glass slipper and they’d be in business.

•

At the grocery store one day, my daughter noticed a little girl sporting a Cinderella backpack. “There’s that princess you don’t like, Mama!” she shouted.

“Um, yeah,” I said, trying not to meet the other mother’s hostile gaze.

“Don’t you like her blue dress, Mama?”

I had to admit, I did.

She thought about this. “Then don’t you like her face?”

“Her face is all right,” I said, noncommittally, though I’m not thrilled to have my Japanese-Jewish child in thrall to those Aryan features. (And what the heck are those blue things covering her ears?) “It’s just, honey, Cinderella doesn’t really do anything.”

Over the next 45 minutes, we ran through that conversation, verbatim, approximately 37 million times, as my daughter pointed out Disney Princess Band-Aids, Disney Princess paper cups, Disney Princess lip balm, Disney Princess pens, Disney Princess crayons and Disney Princess notebooks — all cleverly displayed at the eye level of a 3-year-old trapped in a shopping cart — as well as a bouquet of Disney Princess balloons bobbing over the checkout line. The repetition was excessive, even for a preschooler. What was it about my answers that confounded her? What if, instead of realizing: Aha! Cinderella is a symbol of the patriarchal oppression of all women, another example of corporate mind control and power-to-the-people! my 3-year-old was thinking, Mommy doesn’t want me to be a girl?

According to theories of gender constancy, until they’re about 6 or 7, children don’t realize that the sex they were born with is immutable. They believe that they have a choice: they can grow up to be either a mommy or a daddy. Some psychologists say that until permanency sets in kids embrace whatever stereotypes our culture presents, whether it’s piling on the most spangles or attacking one another with light sabers. What better way to assure that they’ll always remain themselves? If that’s the case, score one for Mooney. By not buying the Princess Pull-Ups, I may be inadvertently communicating that being female (to the extent that my daughter is able to understand it) is a bad thing.

Anyway, you have to give girls some credit. It’s true that, according to Mattel, one of the most popular games young girls play is “bride,” but Disney found that a groom or prince is incidental to that fantasy, a regrettable necessity at best. Although they keep him around for the climactic kiss, he is otherwise relegated to the bottom of the toy box, which is why you don’t see him prominently displayed in stores.

What’s more, just because they wear the tulle doesn’t mean they’ve drunk the Kool-Aid. Plenty of girls stray from the script, say, by playing basketball in their finery, or casting themselves as the powerful evil stepsister bossing around the sniveling Cinderella. I recall a headline-grabbing 2005 British study that revealed that girls enjoy torturing, decapitating and microwaving their Barbies nearly as much as they like to dress them up for dates. There is spice along with that sugar after all, though why this was news is beyond me: anyone who ever played with the doll knows there’s nothing more satisfying than hacking off all her hair and holding her underwater in the bathtub. Princesses can even be a boon to exasperated parents: in our house, for instance, royalty never whines and uses the potty every single time.

“Playing princess is not the issue,” argues Lyn Mikel Brown, an author, with Sharon Lamb, of “Packaging Girlhood: Rescuing Our Daughters From Marketers’ Schemes.” “The issue is 25,000 Princess products,” says Brown, a professor of education and human development at Colby College. “When one thing is so dominant, then it’s no longer a choice: it’s a mandate, cannibalizing all other forms of play. There’s the illusion of more choices out there for girls, but if you look around, you’ll see their choices are steadily narrowing.”

It’s hard to imagine that girls’ options could truly be shrinking when they dominate the honor roll and outnumber boys in college. Then again, have you taken a stroll through a children’s store lately? A year ago, when we shopped for “big girl” bedding at Pottery Barn Kids, we found the “girls” side awash in flowers, hearts and hula dancers; not a soccer player or sailboat in sight. Across the no-fly zone, the “boys” territory was all about sports, trains, planes and automobiles. Meanwhile, Baby GAP’s boys’ onesies were emblazoned with “Big Man on Campus” and the girls’ with “Social Butterfly”; guess whose matching shoes were decorated on the soles with hearts and whose sported a “No. 1” logo? And at Toys “R” Us, aisles of pink baby dolls, kitchens, shopping carts and princesses unfurl a safe distance from the “Star Wars” figures, GeoTrax and tool chests. The relentless resegregation of childhood appears to have sneaked up without any further discussion about sex roles, about what it now means to be a boy or to be a girl. Or maybe it has happened in lieu of such discussion because it’s easier this way.

Easier, that is, unless you want to buy your daughter something that isn’t pink. Girls’ obsession with that color may seem like something they’re born with, like the ability to breathe or talk on the phone for hours on end. But according to Jo Paoletti, an associate professor of American studies at the University of Maryland, it ain’t so. When colors were first introduced to the nursery in the early part of the 20th century, pink was considered the more masculine hue, a pastel version of red. Blue, with its intimations of the Virgin Mary, constancy and faithfulness, was thought to be dainty. Why or when that switched is not clear, but as late as the 1930s a significant percentage of adults in one national survey held to that split. Perhaps that’s why so many early Disney heroines — Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Wendy, Alice-in-Wonderland — are swathed in varying shades of azure. (Purple, incidentally, may be the next color to swap teams: once the realm of kings and N.F.L. players, it is fast becoming the bolder girl’s version of pink.)

It wasn’t until the mid-1980s, when amplifying age and sex differences became a key strategy of children’s marketing (recall the emergence of “ ’tween”), that pink became seemingly innate to girls, part of what defined them as female, at least for the first few years. That was also the time that the first of the generation raised during the unisex phase of feminism — ah, hither Marlo! — became parents. “The kids who grew up in the 1970s wanted sharp definitions for their own kids,” Paoletti told me. “I can understand that, because the unisex thing denied everything — you couldn’t be this, you couldn’t be that, you had to be a neutral nothing.”

The infatuation with the girlie girl certainly could, at least in part, be a reaction against the so-called second wave of the women’s movement of the 1960s and ’70s (the first wave was the fight for suffrage), which fought for reproductive rights and economic, social and legal equality. If nothing else, pink and Princess have resuscitated the fantasy of romance that that era of feminism threatened, the privileges that traditional femininity conferred on women despite its costs — doors magically opened, dinner checks picked up, Manolo Blahniks. Frippery. Fun. Why should we give up the perks of our sex until we’re sure of what we’ll get in exchange? Why should we give them up at all? Or maybe it’s deeper than that: the freedoms feminism bestowed came with an undercurrent of fear among women themselves — flowing through “Ally McBeal,” “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” “Sex and the City” — of losing male love, of never marrying, of not having children, of being deprived of something that felt essentially and exclusively female.

I mulled that over while flipping through “The Paper Bag Princess,” a 1980 picture book hailed as an antidote to Disney. The heroine outwits a dragon who has kidnapped her prince, but not before the beast’s fiery breath frizzles her hair and destroys her dress, forcing her to don a paper bag. The ungrateful prince rejects her, telling her to come back when she is “dressed like a real princess.” She dumps him and skips off into the sunset, happily ever after, alone.

There you have it, “Thelma and Louise” all over again. Step out of line, and you end up solo or, worse, sailing crazily over a cliff to your doom. Alternatives like those might send you skittering right back to the castle. And I get that: the fact is, though I want my daughter to do and be whatever she wants as an adult, I still hope she’ll find her Prince Charming and have babies, just as I have. I don’t want her to be a fish without a bicycle; I want her to be a fish with another fish. Preferably, one who loves and respects her and also does the dishes and half the child care.

There had to be a middle ground between compliant and defiant, between petticoats and paper bags. I remembered a video on YouTube, an ad for a Nintendo game called Super Princess Peach. It showed a pack of girls in tiaras, gowns and elbow-length white gloves sliding down a zip line on parasols, navigating an obstacle course of tires in their stilettos, slithering on their bellies under barbed wire, then using their telekinetic powers to make a climbing wall burst into flames. “If you can stand up to really mean people,” an announcer intoned, “maybe you have what it takes to be a princess.”

Now here were some girls who had grit as well as grace. I loved Princess Peach even as I recognized that there was no way she could run in those heels, that her peachiness did nothing to upset the apple cart of expectation: she may have been athletic, smart and strong, but she was also adorable. Maybe she’s what those once-unisex, postfeminist parents are shooting for: the melding of old and new standards. And perhaps that’s a good thing, the ideal solution. But what to make, then, of the young women in the Girls Inc. survey? It doesn’t seem to be “having it all” that’s getting to them; it’s the pressure to be it all. In telling our girls they can be anything, we have inadvertently demanded that they be everything. To everyone. All the time. No wonder the report was titled “The Supergirl Dilemma.”

The princess as superhero is not irrelevant. Some scholars I spoke with say that given its post-9/11 timing, princess mania is a response to a newly dangerous world. “Historically, princess worship has emerged during periods of uncertainty and profound social change,” observes Miriam Forman-Brunell, a historian at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Francis Hodgson Burnett’s original“Little Princess” was published at a time of rapid urbanization, immigration and poverty; Shirley Temple’s film version was a hit during the Great Depression. “The original folk tales themselves,” Forman-Brunell says, “spring from medieval and early modern European culture that faced all kinds of economic and demographic and social upheaval — famine, war, disease, terror of wolves. Girls play savior during times of economic crisis and instability.” That’s a heavy burden for little shoulders. Perhaps that’s why the magic wand has become an essential part of the princess get-up. In the original stories — even the Disney versions of them — it’s not the girl herself who’s magic; it’s the fairy godmother. Now if Forman-Brunell is right, we adults have become the cursed creatures whom girls have the thaumaturgic power to transform.

•

In the 1990s, third-wave feminists rebelled against their dour big sisters, “reclaiming” sexual objectification as a woman’s right — provided, of course, that it was on her own terms, that she was the one choosing to strip or wear a shirt that said “Porn Star” or make out with her best friend at a frat-house bash. They embraced words like “bitch” and “slut” as terms of affection and empowerment. That is, when used by the right people, with the right dash of playful irony. But how can you assure that? As Madonna gave way to Britney, whatever self-determination that message contained was watered down and commodified until all that was left was a gaggle of 6-year-old girls in belly-baring T-shirts (which I’m guessing they don’t wear as cultural critique). It is no wonder that parents, faced with thongs for 8-year-olds and Bratz dolls’ “passion for fashion,” fill their daughters’ closets with pink sateen; the innocence of Princess feels like a reprieve.

“But what does that mean?” asks Sharon Lamb, a psychology professor at Saint Michael’s College. “There are other ways to express ‘innocence’ — girls could play ladybug or caterpillar. What you’re really talking about is sexual purity. And there’s a trap at the end of that rainbow, because the natural progression from pale, innocent pink is not to other colors. It’s to hot, sexy pink — exactly the kind of sexualization parents are trying to avoid.”

Lamb suggested that to see for myself how “Someday My Prince Will Come” morphs into “Oops! I Did It Again,” I visit Club Libby Lu, the mall shop dedicated to the “Very Important Princess.”

Walking into one of the newest links in the store’s chain, in Natick, Mass., last summer, I had to tip my tiara to the founder, Mary Drolet: Libby Lu’s design was flawless. Unlike Disney, Drolet depended on focus groups to choose the logo (a crown-topped heart) and the colors (pink, pink, purple and more pink). The displays were scaled to the size of a 10-year-old, though most of the shoppers I saw were several years younger than that. The decals on the walls and dressing rooms — “I Love Your Hair,” “Hip Chick,” “Spoiled” — were written in “girlfriend language.” The young sales clerks at this “special secret club for superfabulous girls” are called “club counselors” and come off like your coolest baby sitter, the one who used to let you brush her hair. The malls themselves are chosen based on a company formula called the G.P.I., or “Girl Power Index,” which predicts potential sales revenues. Talk about newspeak: “Girl Power” has gone from a riot grrrrl anthem to “I Am Woman, Watch Me Shop.”

Inside, the store was divided into several glittery “shopping zones” called “experiences”: Libby’s Laboratory, now called Sparkle Spa, where girls concoct their own cosmetics and bath products; Libby’s Room; Ear Piercing; Pooch Parlor (where divas in training can pamper stuffed poodles, pugs and Chihuahuas); and the Style Studio, offering “Libby Du” makeover choices, including ’Tween Idol, Rock Star, Pop Star and, of course, Priceless Princess. Each look includes hairstyle, makeup, nail polish and sparkly tattoos.

As I browsed, I noticed a mother standing in the center of the store holding a price list for makeover birthday parties — $22.50 to $35 per child. Her name was Anne McAuliffe; her daughters — Stephanie, 4, and 7-year-old twins Rory and Sarah — were dashing giddily up and down the aisles.

“They’ve been begging to come to this store for three weeks,” McAuliffe said. “I’d never heard of it. So I said they could, but they’d have to spend their own money if they bought anything.” She looked around. “Some of this stuff is innocuous,” she observed, then leaned toward me, eyes wide and stage-whispered: “But ... a lot of it is horrible. It makes them look like little prostitutes. It’s crazy. They’re babies!”

As we debated the line between frivolous fun and JonBenét, McAuliffe’s daughter Rory came dashing up, pigtails haphazard, glasses askew. “They have the best pocketbooks here,” she said breathlessly, brandishing a clutch with the words “Girlie Girl” stamped on it. “Please, can I have one? It has sequins!”

“You see that?” McAuliffe asked, gesturing at the bag. “What am I supposed to say?”

On my way out of the mall, I popped into the “ ’tween” mecca Hot Topic, where a display of Tinker Bell items caught my eye. Tinker Bell, whose image racks up an annual $400 million in retail sales with no particular effort on Disney’s part, is poised to wreak vengeance on the Princess line that once expelled her. Last winter, the first chapter book designed to introduce girls to Tink and her Pixie Hollow pals spent 18 weeks on The New York Times children’s best-seller list. In a direct-to-DVD now under production, she will speak for the first time, voiced by the actress Brittany Murphy. Next year, Disney Fairies will be rolled out in earnest. Aimed at 6- to 9-year-old girls, the line will catch them just as they outgrow Princess. Their colors will be lavender, green, turquoise — anything but the Princess’s soon-to-be-babyish pink.

To appeal to that older child, Disney executives said, the Fairies will have more “attitude” and “sass” than the Princesses. What, I wondered, did that entail? I’d seen some of the Tinker Bell merchandise that Disney sells at its theme parks: T-shirts reading, “Spoiled to Perfection,” “Mood Subject to Change Without Notice” and “Tinker Bell: Prettier Than a Princess.” At Hot Topic, that edge was even sharper: magnets, clocks, light-switch plates and panties featured “Dark Tink,” described as “the bad girl side of Miss Bell that Walt never saw.”

Girl power, indeed.

A few days later, I picked my daughter up from preschool. She came tearing over in a full-skirted frock with a gold bodice, a beaded crown perched sideways on her head. “Look, Mommy, I’m Ariel!” she crowed. referring to Disney’s Little Mermaid. Then she stopped and furrowed her brow. “Mommy, do you like Ariel?”

I considered her for a moment. Maybe Princess is the first salvo in what will become a lifelong struggle over her body image, a Hundred Years’ War of dieting, plucking, painting and perpetual dissatisfaction with the results. Or maybe it isn’t. I’ll never really know. In the end, it’s not the Princesses that really bother me anyway. They’re just a trigger for the bigger question of how, over the years, I can help my daughter with the contradictions she will inevitably face as a girl, the dissonance that is as endemic as ever to growing up female. Maybe the best I can hope for is that her generation will get a little further with the solutions than we did.

For now, I kneeled down on the floor and gave my daughter a hug.

She smiled happily. “But, Mommy?” she added. “When I grow up, I’m still going to be a fireman.”

Peggy Orenstein is a contributing writer for the magazine. Her book “Waiting for Daisy: A Tale of Two Continents, Three Religions, Five Infertility Doctors, An Oscar, An Atomic Bomb, A Romantic Night and One Woman’s Quest to Become a Mother” will be published in February by Bloomsbury.

Six-year-old painting prodigy

A Young Painter Who's Really Skipping Ahead

By William Booth
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, June 26, 2006; C01



Marla Olmstead, 6, at the opening of her first show on the West Coast. One of her abstract works is priced at $25,000. (By Jonathan Alcorn For The Washington Post)

ENCINO, Calif It is the late afternoon -- the sugar hours -- of her first solo show on the West Coast, and the abstract expressionist Marla Olmstead is clomping around on the blond wood floors of the storefront art space, clop, clop, clop, in big, pointy high heels.

Anne Kleins. Size eightish. Ink black.

Her publicist, the gallery owners, her family, a documentary filmmaker, several photographers: huddling, indulgent, wary, loving, respectful -- yet all watching.

Around and around the gallery the young artist Olmstead goes. Giggling. Clop. Clop. The workmen are putting the finishing touches on the title cards for the Saturday evening opening. The big canvases, six-footers, the enigmatic fuzzy circle titled "Burning Blue Ball" and the itchy, angry "Mosquito Bite" and the yellow-and-orange slash work called "Zane Dancing."

Top asking price: $25,000.

That figure -- a new kitchen? -- produces a queasy questioning about career paths not chosen. But it does not seem to impress Olmstead one way or another.

She is? Just clomping. Then. Shush. Wait. She is eating a pretzel now. Portent? She has discarded the muse shoes, which are actually her mother's. She is now barefoot. She is making choo-choo sounds. She is bliss? She begins to crawl on her belly. She is a frog. She is hiding under a table.

She is 6 years old.

Why are we -- the adults -- here? Here in Encino, in the baking San Fernando Valley, at a gallery triangulated by a Mr. Kosher grocery store, a White Rabbit adult novelty emporium and a place, seriously, called the Titanic Traffic School? Why does anybody do anything anymore? A network morning talk show host suggested, on camera, before millions, after admitting that she didn't know much about art, that Marla's work reminded her of Jackson Pollock.

Anthony Brunelli, an artist and gallery owner in her home town of Binghamton, N.Y., who sells Marla's work (and therefore has a financial hedge in all this), suggested she might be a "genius." Some prefer the term "child prodigy." Articles in papers in New York, London and Rome reference Kandinsky, Miro and Klee -- and Marla Olmstead.

She began her career when she was not quite 2.

What does a collector get, for the price of a mid-size Mazda? That is a good question. We don't have the answer. Because the real question is: What is art? And more to the point: What is kiddie art? And have they taken over?

Although we had total access, a substantive interview with Marla is not possible. With the assistance of her mother, Laura, we learn that her favorite color is pink (in earlier interviews, Marla had said it was yellow). Her favorite ice cream: strawberry. The artist recently completed kindergarten and is missing her two front teeth.

At one point another adult cornered her and asked about her plastic bracelet.

Q. "Does it glow?"

A. (After a really long pause) "Yes."

Other insights? Although we are no psychology major, Marla Olmstead seems completely normal and was giddy-fun-a-go-go to run around the gallery with her younger brother, Zane, and a couple of other apple-cheeked tots. She looked: happy.

Said Mom: "Marla is very excited. Hopefully, they'll be cookies." (There were.)

And cheese slices, watermelon cubes and meat pieces, and Charles Shaw wine for the adults (Trader Joe's, $1.99 a bottle).

Here's the back story:

Marla's father, Mark, is a manager at the Frito-Lay food processing plant in Binghamton, where Ruffles are made and 700 people are employed. His people -- father, uncle, grandfather -- were painters, amateur and professional. The pros were sign painters.

When Mark's father died, Mark bought some acrylic paint and supplies and started dabbling. Daughter Marla, at that point yet quite 2, reached out for the brushes and wanted to create. Dad indulged, he says, and the toddler impressed him enough that he yielded a canvas.

A friend of the family's hung a few of Marla's paintings in his Binghamton coffee shop. This was August 2003. A patron asked to buy one, and Marla's mom says she came up with a "crazy price" of $250, because she said she did not want to part with any of them and assumed no rational adult would pony up. She was wrong.

Then Binghamton artist Brunelli plugged into the Marla mix and held a gallery show, and the local paper, the Press & Sun-Bulletin, ran a piece (favorite Marla animal: pigs). The New York Times followed up, and her work soon started fetching several thousands of dollars as collectors snapped up the Marlas.

Stuart Simpson, who opened the StuART Gallery in Encino, happened to be in Binghamton on business (he is a contractor-engineer of sound studios). He bought four Marlas. He says he was blown away by her work. "I hear regularly from people: 'My grandkids could do this.' I say give it a shot. Because they can't. This is a once-in-a-lifetime thing. I think most people struggle all their lives to know what they should do. Marla knows what she should do."

Simpson references Monets and Matisses. One of the paintings he bought, called "Bottom Feeder," hangs in his home. Simpson said, "I'll have a glass of wine and look at the painting, and see something in the painting one night, and another night, I see something else."

His wife, Marte, said that "when he told me he had bought the paintings of a 4-year-old, I said: 'Great, they're going in his office, where I don't have to see them.' But when I looked at the Marlas, the size of the paintings, the colors and placement and texture, this is a kid's painting, but it's painting of gift and talent."

Marte Simpson calls Marla "an old soul."

In February 2005, "60 Minutes II" ran a Charlie Rose-anchored segment that raised questions about the Marlas. The producer got the family to agree to install a hidden camera to watch young Olmstead paint a canvas start to finish.

On the video, one can hear her dad saying: "Psst. Paint the red. Paint the red. You're driving me crazy. Paint the red. . . . If you paint, honey, like you were --"

Marla: "Please."

Dad: "This is not the way it should be."

Okay. This doesn't look good. Laura Olmstead explains to us that the hidden-camera scene was not ideal, that her husband said what he said ("It did look like he was coaching her," she says), but Laura swears that the Marla paintings were all painted by Marla, that the parents never laid on a hand on the canvases except to prime them for painting.

"She's not a coachable child," Laura says.

To rebut the skeptics, the couple produced a long-running video of Marla painting "Oceans," and in the 20 minutes we watched at the gallery (along with a handful of guests), the child is doing all the paint splattering, smearing, squirting and brushwork. She selects colors out of a tube, applies them and works the colors together on the canvas, using brushes and spatulas. She is wearing her PJs while she does this, and brother Zane watches.

"Those paintings are all Marla," says Laura.

The proceeds of her work, says Mom, go into a college fund. The couple estimate that the daughter has produced about 90 works, and more than 60 have sold.

Early on during the first night of the show, no paintings have sold. A couple of patrons stand before one of the works, titled "Everyone's House," and wonder aloud:

"Is that a rocket ship?"

"Or a crayon?"

"Or a weird bug?"

Art, they say, it is in the eye of the beholder.

The artist Marla Olmstead, herself, is not saying. She is eating an ice cream cone.
© 2006 The Washington Post Company