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| From
the January/February 2009 issue of The Horn Book Magazine A Second Look
Wow. What a trip. Keith’s 1974 copy is seriously battered, because we read it a lot, and we sang it a lot. It burst into our consciousness like a fireworks chrysanthemum, startling and brilliant. It said things we were just beginning to articulate as parents. Boys can play with dolls. Girls can play baseball. Mommies and Daddies are people who do things, and not always the same things. Housework sucks (although that particular expression owned its original sexual connotation quite strongly then, and would never have appeared in a children’s book), but it is less icky if everyone helps. Everyone should help. War is not healthy for children and other living things. We as young parents were looking for a new paradigm. We wanted stories where the princess rescued the prince, or the dragon, or herself. We wanted William’s Doll and Mommies at Work. We wanted the generic he to be he or she — we knew that children heard he and thought boy no matter what grammarians said. We wanted our son to have stories where both parents cooked, like his; where both parents cared for him, like his; where aunts and friends made families, like his. Free to Be . . . You and Me came at the early stages of a revolution in the pages of picture books and in the language of daily life. And it had a musical recording as well as a book format — really quite daring. Looking at that original edition is pretty groovy. Little boys and little girls are made of the same things — care and love, none of this sugar-and-spice or puppy-dog-tails stuff. In “The Pain and The Great One,” Judy Blume sings the operatic agony of an older sister and her really irritating younger brother in side-by-side poems. Dan Greenburg’s ditty “My Dog Is a Plumber” reminds us that you cannot always tell “just what someone is by what he does well.” Not only is it all right for anyone to cry, but Phil Ressner made a small, gorgeous vignette of it in which the school principal congratulates Dudley Pippin, who had been unfairly punished, on crying very well. He reassures Dudley that he isn’t a sissy, and then plays a little tune on his flute so that the music “filled the quiet street and went out over the darkling trees and the whole world.” It makes one sigh with satisfaction. If you aren’t an “old lady feminist” and mom as I am, it may be surprising to you that these ideas were kind of radical at the time. Speaking of radical, Elaine Laron’s “No One Else” actually insists on the primacy of a child’s feelings: books and folks and parents can tell you how to spell or ride a bike or plant a seed, but no one can tell you how to feel, or what to love. It was with a keen sense of delight and anticipation that I turned to the shiny new thirty-fifth anniversary edition. The update is both gentle and dramatic. There’s color, more color, everywhere, in fonts as well as faces. The wonderful black-and-white Arnold Lobel image of Dudley Pippin and the principal now has a colorful band of musical notes dancing across it. Judith Viorst’s “The Southpaw,” a delicious exchange between Janet, who wants to pitch, and her “former friend” Richard, who is trying to keep girls off the baseball team, appeared on torn scraps of notebook paper in the first edition; now it’s in e-mail, but it is just as funny. Shel Silverstein’s “Ladies First” is thankfully included, wherein a prissy little alpha girl insists on being first at everything, even, as it turns out, being first in her jungle-exploring party to get eaten by a group of tigers. I was a little surprised at how fresh the text remains. In “Zachary’s Divorce” his mother says, “It’s not your divorce Zachary, it’s Daddy’s and mine.” In “Atalanta” the princess and the local boy race across the finish line together, then “Atalanta told John about her telescopes and her pigeons, and John told Atalanta about his globes and his studies of geography. At the end of the day, they were friends.” There’s nothing old or stale. Missing, alas, is Sheldon Harnick’s “Housework,” voiced by Carol Channing on the original recording, and the heartbreaking “How I Crossed the Street for the First Time All by Myself” by Herb Gardner, who pulled a world of urban childhood angst into a stream-of-consciousness rap. Additions include David Slavin’s “If Wishes Were Fishes,” a poem about respecting the Earth, with an elegantly surreal illustration by Peter Sís. The songs, with music, are gathered together at the end of the new edition, and a CD of some of the original music is attached to the back inside cover. How wonderful to hear Rosey Grier sing “It’s All Right to Cry” again! (Roosevelt Grier was a professional football player and needlepoint crafter who is now a minister.) Besides a revitalized design, winsome grace notes are scattered about the pages: a tiny football player’s tag reads “Free to be a dancer.” A tiny girl with a cape is “Free to be a hero!” Vibrant new illustrations by Tony diTerlizzi, Henry Cole, Jerry Pinkney, Christopher Myers, and LeUyen Pham inspire small glows of recognition. We expect, now, to hear inclusive pronouns and have shelves full of plucky princesses and gentle princes. But wait, there’s more in Free to Be . . . : it is a definite goodness to see, in cheery context, that crying is a part of living, that baseball and cooking are not gender-specific activities, and that friendship between the sexes is not only possible but desirable. The times are still a-changin’, and these irrepressible songs and stories will surely resonate in another generation’s making of themselves and their lives.
From the January/February 2009 issue of The Horn Book Magazine |
n
April 18, 1974, my son Keith’s fifth birthday, we gave him
a copy of Free to Be . . . You and Me. The
bookplate we inscribed featured, along with his name, a psychedelic–cum–art
nouveau tree whose branches were filled with children of many colors.
A dove with an olive branch flew over the bright orange background.
Hey — it was the seventies. When Horn Book editor
Roger Sutton shot me an e-mail addressed to “old lady feminist”
asking me to look at the new, thirty-fifth anniversary edition,
I immediately called Keith, who still had that original edition
on his shelves. It also sent us, mother and son, to iTunes. Keith
downloaded the whole original recording of Free to Be . . .
music; I contented myself with the title theme. 
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