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In addition to making Snow White fashionable, Grim also “began to absorb more and more of the actual live model” into his drawings, writes Johnson, who happened to be a 14-year-old girl named Marge Belcher, who was 16 when they finished filming. Take a look at that face—it’s not exactly the childlike countenance Disney princesses have these days, is it?
Look at Snow White on the Disney Princess official website, Sure she’s been hipped up a bit to fit into modern times and, apparently, that included her waistline—it’s smaller than Barbie’s! (Go download Snow White’s wallpaper and then ask yourself, are the dwarfs even feeding her?)
Bonnie Erickson designed and built the inimitable Miss Piggy in 1974 for an early “Muppets” television special, produced by Jim Henson. Puppets, props and storyboards from Henson’s prolific career are featured in the traveling exhibit ”Jim Henson’s Fantastic World.” Anika Gupta spoke with Erickson.
You’ve been designing muppets and mascots for years. What attracts you to them?
The creation of worlds—the whole process of designing characters, putting together a back story, giving the characters an environment in which they can thrive and casting performers who can bring them to life.
Why do puppets appeal to adults as well as children?
They’ve been a tradition across the world for thousands of years as a form of storytelling. But, until recently, they have’t been appreciated in the United States. Now, however, puppetry is finding a niche in the arts—dance, theater and even opera. I think people appreciate the performers’ skill as well as the artistry of the puppets themselves. We owe a lot of that to [Muppets creator] Jim Henson’s vision.
Who inspired the character of Miss Piggy?
My mother used to live in North Dakota where Peggy Lee sang on the local radio station before she became a famous jazz singer. When I first created Miss Piggy I called her Miss Piggy Lee—as both a joke and an homage. Peggy Lee was a very independent woman, and Piggy certainly is the same. But as Piggy’s fame began to grow, nobody wanted to upset Peggy Lee, especially because we admired her work. So, the Muppet’s name was shortened to Miss Piggy.
Bzzzpeek is an engaging little website that’ll play you clips of kids from various different countries making the sounds they think dogs, lions, and other common animals make. There seems to be very little disagreement across cultures about what cats say. Frogs, however, are another story entirely. And fair enough: the American “ribbit” is a pretty strange set of syllables to assign to frog noises. See bzzzpeek here. Via VSL.
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Phaedra Taylor abstained from sex until marriage. But she began researching birth control methods before she was even engaged, and by the time she married David Taylor, she was already charting her fertility.
Taylor, a fresh-faced 28-year-old who would blend in easily with South Austin bohemians, ruled out taking birth control pills after reading a book that claimed the pill could, in some cases, make the uterus uninhabitable after conception occurred. She viewed that as abortion, which she opposes.
“I just wasn’t willing to risk it,” she said.
Taylor wanted her faith to guide her sexual and reproductive decisions after marriage. Natural family planning felt like the best way to honor God, she said.
Update: See David Taylor’s response to the piece on his blog here. “After all these years of trying to get the Statesman to print something about the church and the arts in Austin I now have the honor of having a portion of my sex life on the front page.” You go, David!
Our idea is that Coca-Cola could use their distribution channels (which are amazing in developing countries) to distribute rehydration salts to the people that need them desperately. Maybe by dedicating one compartment in every 10 crates as ‘the life saving’ compartment?
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Speaking of literary critics, I was thinking yesterday of Rozanov’s devastating critique of Herzen: He is so good, wrote Rozanov, so reasonable, so sane—and yet he will never make a young girl cry over a page of his prose.
But then I thought, as I do whenever I think of that line: What’s so great about making young girls cry?
But also, this time: If a young girl ran into Herzen in the comments section of a blog, he would almost certainly make her cry.
Are you happy now, Rozanov?
]]>Meghan is reflecting on Will Wilkinson’s reflection on a Newsweek article on how having children doesn’t make people happy. The assumption all around seems to be that this tells us something about the costs of having children. But shouldn’t we also consider the possibility that this tells us something about the costs of monitoring our own happiness? Or the costs of having defined happiness in such a way — and having organized the structure of our lives around the pursuit of happiness in such a way — that having children compromises it? It’s interesting that we’re more willing to do a cost-benefit analysis of having children than to do a cost-benefit analysis of eagerly participating in a culture of narcissism.
Here’s my thought for the day. In 1991 Rolling Stone interviewed Bob Dylan on the occasion of his 50th birthday, and at one point the interviewer asked Dylan if he was happy. This seemed to puzzle him a bit, and he was silent for a minute. Then he said, “You know,” he said, “these are yuppie words, happiness and unhappiness. It’s not happiness or unhappiness, it’s either blessed or unblessed. As the Bible says, ‘Blessed is the man who walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly.’”
Even today, there are only a handful of other shelters in the United States that cater specifically to former prostitutes, despite the growing number of children in the trade (estimates say there are 250,000 at any given time in the States). GEMS, opened in New York in 2001, and another, Angela’s House, opened in Atlanta in 2003. Children of the Night was the prototype for both, but both are newer, smaller, and don’t have the capacity to house their charges indefinitely or to provide services to former residents. Another difference: COTN isn’t funded with government grants. It is supported entirely by private donations, which means that Lee can spend the money pretty much as she chooses.
What she chooses is to provide the kids at her shelter with the closest thing to a comfortable middle-class childhood that they have ever had. All of their needs are met, and many of their desires as well. They are flown into Los Angeles from all over the country, and delivered to the shelter in a cab. Upon their arrival, kids are assigned a semi-private bedroom, and issued either a CD player or a DVD player.
First, Children of the Night takes care of the basics: each girl is assigned a caseworker. She is sent to a doctor for a full physical, to an off-site therapist, to a dentist. She is also enrolled in school, which is right on-site, and fully accredited. Residents at COTN get haircuts and manicures at high-end salons that volunteer their services. They attend workshops, where professionals drop in to teach them photography, yoga, meditation, acting, screenwriting, and dance.