Hot Chocolate and Captain Kangaroo: My Most Must-See, Trouble-Free Nutcracker Productions

Oh, just sprawling across a bank of institutional chairs and trimming one's pointe shoes with a pocket knife... you know, as one does!

Okay, did you traumatize your children or sprain yourself side-eyeing all of the weird and troubling Nutcracker productions, and now you need to look at something nice?

Yes, I might mostly fixate on the weird ones, but there ARE tons of wholesome Nutcracker productions out there in the world. Some productions are just charming and fun, with all sketchy innuendos and racist and sexist tropes deleted--you can watch these without having have any uncomfortable conversations with your children. Some productions have made especially thoughtful choices that demonstrate true equity and inclusion and mean you get to have GOOD conversations with your children--yay! And some productions stay weird, but also in a thoughtful, empowering, purposeful way--these aren't for children, necessarily, but they're interesting and entertaining for adults.

San Francisco Ballet: The Nutcracker

San Francisco Ballet boasts the first complete US production of The Nutcracker, performed in 1944. So watching any of their Nutcracker productions would be notable, but the 2004 production, in particular, choreographed by Helgi Tomasson, is super wholesome and adorable. For a pleasant change, Drosselmeyer does not give off a single insidious, creepy, villainous or sketch vibe of any sort, and actually manages to successfully play the role of an eccentric artist who's just excited to show off the cool stuff he makes, and then solicitously chaperones Clara on an overnight field trip and gets her back home safely. 

Here's a bootleg of the 2007 production on YouTube right now:

The production's conceit that Clara goes to visit the 1915 World's Fair is cute, and it makes the world showcase of Divertissements make sense. My favorite part is near the end, when the Sugar Plum Fairy briefly turns Clara into an adult ballerina so she can have a proper pas de deux with her Prince, and it's sweet but not romantic, and Clara wakes up as a child back in her bed again in the morning. 

Other fun moments: the Arabian female lead popping up out of a giant genie's bottle, a Prologue slideshow of iconic 1915 San Francisco sights, and ribbon dancing!

New York City Ballet: The Nutcracker (revised 2017)

The Nutcracker choreographed by George Balanchine is iconic, and after you've watched it once, ever afterwards you'll notice in every other production you ever see parts that were "borrowed" from his vision. Ahem.

Unfortunately, part of his iconic production that's often borrowed is more of that stupid racist imagery. Chinese Tea is particularly gross, with all the racist stereotypes and unflattering caricatures that you can imagine all just sort of stuffed into one very short number. For that reason, I don't recommend the pretty widely available 2011 New York City Ballet production, available on DVD and right now via this bootleg on YouTube:

Skim through the bootleg if it's still up, if you want, to check out the bullshit costume on the male lead of Chinese Tea. So unnecessary and offensive.

However, New York City ballet revised Chinese Tea in 2017, so now if you're lucky enough to be able to see it live, it will be uniformly delightful! I've long wanted to see this particular production, and I'm not even going to tell you how often I watch the Candy Cane dance from it:

It's part of the good vibes watchlist that I pull out when I'm bummed, along with Tom Holland lip syncing to Rihanna and the "How Far I'll Go" performance at the 2017 Academy Awards.

This updated Nutcracker, or excerpts from the DVD version, pairs with one of our favorite ballet books for children, A Very Young Dancer:

I read all of the Very Young series when I was a kid, and when my own kid was, herself, a very young dancer, I checked it out for her every year during Nutcracker season. It's about a child in the School of American Ballet who plays the role of Clara in the New York City Ballet's Nutcracker. It's written very simply, from the child's perspective, with a lot of black-and-white photos that make one feel like they're really getting a behind-the-scenes look at the school and the production. 

Joffrey Ballet: The Nutcracker

Joffrey Ballet seems to be very diligent about protecting their IP, so this is another production that I'm unable to find a bootleg for, nor can I find the 2017 PBS documentary, "Making a New American Nutcracker," about the Joffrey Ballet's production.

However, seeing this production remains on my bucket list because, as far as I know, the Joffrey Ballet is the only large-scale, prestigious company that includes a role in The Nutcracker deliberately designed for a child in their Adaptive Dance program:

I would LOVE to watch children with different abilities sharing a professional stage and performing a role that respects and includes them. I'd love to see every production behaving so thoughtfully with their casting.

Debbie Allen Dance Academy: Hot Chocolate Nutcracker

One year when we had Netflix for a month so we could catch up on Stranger Things (something that we clearly need to do again so I can watch Season 4!), the kids and I also watched Dance Dreams: Hot Chocolate Nutcracker, and now we super want to see it live someday. Will also did a biography project on Debbie Allen around that time, and Syd took some of her free online dance classes in the early days of Covid, so we're very much fans of Debbie Allen and her non-profit dance school.

Again, they do a great job protecting their IP (ahem), but they've got some approved clips of various numbers on YouTube.

Here's the Candy Cane dance:

Here's the Bollywood number:

Syd would be SO excited to learn a really fun and exciting genre like step, hip-hop, or Bollywood in concert with her classical ballet classes. It's just so cool what Debbie Allen is doing for the children in her program.

Captain Kangaroo: The Nutcracker Suite

So, if you've got little kids, this is the cutest thing EVER. In 1958, Bob Keeshan made a record in his Captain Kangaroo persona in which he narrated the story of The Nutcracker, including adding lyrics to some of the numbers, and it is charming! 

You can still buy the vinyl--

--but fortunately Archive.org also has the entire record available for streaming and download. 

I didn't discover this album until the kids were too old to appreciate it, but if I'd known about it, I'd have spent every December of their baby through preschool years with it on constant repeat--it's THAT cute!

Somerville Theatre: The Slutcracker

Okay, you know this isn't for kids. But for an adult, what a way to work through the Nutcracker trauma of your youth and/or the Nutcracker trauma of your time parenting a child ballerina!

Somerville Theatre's The Slutcracker gets amazing reviews every year, and it looks like the most fun, lighthearted, irreverent spoof of everything sketch and suss in every Nutcracker production you've ever experienced. 

Once again, I do have a ton more Nutcracker productions that I could drone on and on about genuinely loving, but not only do I have Mouse milkmaid braids to do again in a few minutes, but some MAJOR wig drama went down during last night's dress rehearsal and so I also, as you can imagine, have about fourteen different chat threads to maintain and a lot of roasting to do.

Happy Opening Night, Friends! May the Mouse Army prevail!

The New and Improved Way to Press Flowers in the Microwave

I spent years pressing flowers in the microwave using the supplies that I had on hand--a terra cotta plant dish, a Pyrex bowl, and paper towels.

But when my Girl Scout troop also wanted to learn how to press flowers in the microwave, I realized that what's good enough for me is not NEARLY good enough for them! They needed proper materials and a clearer method.

A trip to the town's ReStore scored me a whole troop's worth of unglazed terra cotta tiles at something like ten cents apiece. And simply substituting white typing paper--even the back sides of used typing paper!--turned out to be a much easier method than using paper towels, with a cleaner-looking result, as well.

So here's the new and improved way to turn your microwave into a flower press!

You will need:

• two unglazed terra cotta tiles. The larger the better, as the size of the tile is the limiting factor in the size of flower you'll be able to press. The tops should be completely smooth.
• plain typing paper, several sheets. Recycle used typing paper, as long as at least one side is blank and clean.
• freshly-picked flowers. I think the ones that have a distinctive front and back are most easily pressed, but you do you!

1. Set up the microwave flower press. 

The bread of your flower press sandwich consists of two unglazed terra cotta tiles, the unglazed fronts facing each other. 

My tiles have gotten dirty because the backsides of the paper that I've been laying against them has had printing on it. It won't affect the flowers, though, and they'll wash clean. 

Fold a stack of 4-5 pieces of typing paper in half. Place the flowers you'd like to press in the fold of the typing paper stack, then fold the top of the stack over the flowers and sandwich the stack in between the terra cotta tiles.

If your flowers are especially big and juicy, you may have to dissect them a bit before you place them in the press.

2. Microwave the flower press. 

Pop the entire flower press into the microwave, and microwave it for approximately 30 seconds.

Use an oven mitt to lift off the top tile, then check the flowers. They should feel dry, not damp. If they're still damp, continue to microwave in 15-20 second intervals, checking in between. 

If the flowers are already a little crispy, then you've microwaved them too long. Better luck next time!

When the flowers are perfect, let the entire press cool for a few minutes before you remove them. If you've got several terra cotta tiles, you can keep a few flower presses going simultaneously:

While a third person grates cheese, ahem.

A DIY microwave flower press is SUCH a time saver! Even fairly young kids can work it, as long as an adult handles the hot parts, and this makes the entire process of collecting, pressing, and studying or crafting with flowers a lot more enjoyable for a small child. 

You can also use this press in tandem with a traditional flower press--which you can also DIY! Put flowers into the traditional press right away while you're hiking, then transfer them to the microwave press to finish them off when you get home. 

Homeschool Art History: Frida Kahlo and Political Art

 

Art history isn't something that has its own curriculum on the kids' homeschool high school transcripts. Instead, at least so far, it's something that we've done as unit studies, and then I've incorporated those studies into whatever syllabus best fits it. For Will, all of her high school art studies, both hands-on and history/appreciation activities, are included as a 1-credit Fine Arts class on her transcript, and the syllabus includes details of each activity and resources used, written after the fact based on what was actually accomplished.

Syd will have numerous Fine Arts classes on her high school transcript, and it's my hope that one of them will, indeed, be Art History, although for that to be a credit that stands on its own we'll have to conduct a more thorough, extensive study at some point.

Until then, we study the art that interests the kids, as it catches their interest. And recently, that was Frida Kahlo, inspired by the Mexico study that was, itself, inspired by our Girl Scout troop's Spring Break cruise.

As we often do when we start a completely new unit of study, we started our Frida Kahlo unit with a selection of picture books. You know that expression--"Explain it to me like I'm five?" Picture books are meant to offer digestible explanations in an appealing manner, often exploring a topic through a unique lens meant to engage and inspire.

Both of these books were excellent introductions to the basics of Kahlo's life and works:

• Portrait of an Artist: Frida Kahlo
• Frida Kahlo and the Bravest Girl in the World

I've been trying to relearn some of my Spanish this year, so the kids also let me read to them from this awesome book:

• Frida Kahlo y Sus Animalitos

So many animal names to look up and learn! Clearly, my college Spanish classes focused on the wrong things...

Part of the work for this study was creating activities to teach younger Girl Scouts about Frida Kahlo for our Girl Scout troop's World Thinking Day kit, so the kids chose their favorite Frida Kahlo paintings, and I used Google Image searches to find and download high-quality jpegs of them and printed them two to a page on cardstock. I try to remember to do this with all the images we study, whether they're paintings, photos, sculpture, or whatever. They come in endlessly handy for comparison and review, they make your Timeline game even bigger and better, and it's awesome how often they come in handy to build context in a different study. 

And because every good Girl Scout activity includes a craft, the kids of COURSE had to test out these Frida Kahlo paper dolls:

Beyond the picture books and paper dolls, the kids and I LOVED this American Experience documentary on Frida Kahlo:

It's a surprisingly exciting ride, with shocking moments, plot twists, stunning revelations, and a strong female lead! And it answers the question of Was Frida Kahlo The Most Epic Person To Ever Have Lived? with a resounding...

OMG yes. Hard yes. All. The. Yes.

Once we were all devoted Frida Kahlo fangirls, I wanted the kids to have some practice analyzing her art. We'd also been talking separately about different methods of political protest, from flipping off the people who harass visitors to our local Planned Parenthood to participating in a march to support abortion rights, etc., so it seemed like a good chance to use Frida Kahlo as an example of how gender affects political speech, the kinds of political issues relevant to gender issues, and how personal speech can conflate with political speech to empower both.

We did a similar study of political speech in racial justice a couple of years ago, so this unit also builds upon that one.

For this study, we focused more overtly on the definition of political art, and examples of the main types of political art:

I borrowed heavily from the PBS LearningMedia lesson on The Life and Times of Frida Kahlo for this, including borrowing the second page of this student handout for the kids to use to organize their work. 

For their culminating project in this study, I assigned the kids each a selection of Kahlo pieces, and other pieces like Shepard Fairey's Obama graphic, Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights, a mural that's locally infamous for including a KKK cross burning, and that lost Diego Rivera mural, and asked the kids to thoughtfully categorize each piece as personal or a specific type of political, justifying their conclusions with evidence. I wouldn't necessarily say that I agreed with all of their categorizations, but they did back up their claims with evidence!

If we'd wanted to carry this study further, the kids could have used that worksheet as the basis for any number of essays, or they could have created their own personal-as-political self portraits or political art of any category. We might do some political art, anyway, as the kids have expressed interest in coming with me to the next Bans Off Our Bodies Block Party, and obviously they can't go without excellent protest signs!

I was happy, though, for the kids to simply accomplish my main learning objectives for them: 1) to fall in love with Frida Kahlo, and 2) to widen their understanding of how we, particularly as women, can express ourselves politically in this patriarchal culture. 

Ooh, how awesome would a Frida Kahlo-themed protest sign be?!? 

Homeschool Field Trip: We Immersed Ourselves in Van Gogh

 True fact time: the kids just don't love art museums. The older teenager, at least, has gradually transitioned from pitching a fit the moment we enter to keeping herself entertained by reading every sign, but both kids take a trip to an art museum like medicine... or, more accurately, like a homeschool assignment that they didn't choose but they know I'm going to make them do, regardless, so they might as well suck it up and get it over with.

We probably didn't *really* need to hit up the art museum on this day, because the trip wasn't related to anything the kids are currently studying, and they're a little too old for the "let's go to this random place and do this random thing" adventures that took up a lot of our homeschool days when they were small and every single thing was brand-new and potentially the beginning of a new passion.

However, I could not pass up this fleeting chance--

--to immerse ourselves in Van Gogh!

It was really pretty, and I loved it (although I had the thought, numerous times, that it would be even better if I was high...). The kids were a bit baffled, I think (the older teenager mentioned more than once that she'd liked Otherworld better, lol), but again, no getting out of the educational activity when Mom is this insistent! The younger teenager even asked for my phone so she could take some photos of ME, for a change:

She may have discovered the activity that I discovered when the kids were baby-sized and I was bored out of my skull ferrying them around the same playground for the fortieth day in a row or sitting on my ass watching them play with the garden hose for eight hours, which is Taking Photos Solely To Keep Oneself Entertained. Honestly, it IS a great way to entertain yourself, and it resulted in so many awesome photos of my little kids doing awesome things... and then one day Matt "borrowed" my hard drive and accidentally deleted, like, a decade's worth of those photos. And that's how I now have maybe two photos of my kids between the years of 2005 and 2015 that aren't on my blog, and I get to throw it in Matt's face and win every fight we ever have until the end of time.

But look how far we've come--now our photos are in a real art museum!

Before we left, we got our pictures taken with Van Gogh--

I definitely left feeling like I'd fully immersed myself, and the teenager's photographic evidence agrees!

On to the rest of the museum!

I particularly liked the new exhibit that put art from different parts of the museum's collections into conversation with each other:

The kids and I played the game entitled Has This Artist Ever Seen a Baby?

Kind of, but not up close and probably only for a minute.

Definitively YES! This artist probably talks to babies like they're adults and graciously accepts toddler offerings of interesting sticks.

The award for People Tried To Talk To Us and We Didn't Like Them goes to the two security guards at the outdoor entrance to the museum's gardens, who made me pull my museum tickets back up on my phone to show them, then security wand scanned all of us again and peered into our bag of crumpled lunch remains and my bag containing nothing but, like, fifty tampons (perimenopause is no joke!) and were kind of snotty about my confusion. 

Because, you know, the other entrance to the garden is just over that way? And there aren't any guards over there? So we could have just strolled in without handing over our wallets and phones and car keys? No, seriously, I'm ASKING!

Whatever. The azaleas are gorgeous:

And so are the peonies!

In the Native American Art gallery, I was surprised to see these:

They and I come from practically the same hometown!

I have a lot of feelings about the mounds built by early indigenous peoples, and a deep interest that I developed when I first studied their history with my kids. Mostly, these sites haven't been respected, and I think that's part of the overall genocide attempted on these nations. Spiro Mounds were completely leveled at one point--like, COMPLETELY LEVELED--and Midwestern white dudes nabbed whatever shit they could find that hadn't already been destroyed, popped them into their personal collections so they could be known as Collectors of Prehistoric Indian Artifacts, and we're lucky if this stuff even made it into museums when they died and wasn't stuffed in someone's attic or tossed onto a table in their yard sale, provenance completely erased. Imagine what we could know about these peoples if their artifacts hadn't been scattered and destroyed and hoarded in private collections? That is a SEASHELL up there that they found in Spiro Mounds! In OKLAHOMA! There is a cup literally decorated with pictures of the severed heads of someone's enemies! Imagine what we could know if the mounds that they built hadn't been plowed over, looted, bulldozed over, forgotten in someone's weedy back forty? One of the big reasons why the mounds have gotten wrapped up in ideas of Nephilim burial sites and similar crackpot theories is that historically, the crackpot theorists were the ones actually interested in doing research on the mounds, investigating local histories to find them and sneaking onto people's private property to take grainy black-and-white photos of them and doing their independent research on them as best they could without the benefits of an academic community to help out and provide standards and best practices. All of these sites should be lovingly preserved as cultural treasures, and the fact that they're not is just plain racist.

*clears throat uncomfortably, then steps down off of soapbox and scuttles away*

OMG sorry. Look at this Georgia O'Keeffe!

The kids more or less gamely wended their way with me through art--

See that tripwire at the bottom of the photo? The kids and I entertained ourselves endlessly in a discussion of how likely the older teenager was to have stepped back, tripped over it, fallen backwards into the Georgia O'Keeffe painting, ripped a head-sized hole in it, gashed her scalp open on the frame, then fallen to the floor in front of it, screaming, blood everywhere. In that case, the younger teenager and I reckoned we'd probably just scoot and meet up with her at home later.

--activities--

--and oddities:

On the long drive home through Friday afternoon rush hour traffic, they dove back into their books and screens, shaking off the adventure as yet another Homeschool Day Trip To Please Mom. I filed it away as one more fleetingly magical experience of my last few days ever homeschooling both my daughters together.

Puzzle Games That Teenagers Like: Izzi

I didn't actually mean for this to turn into a series, but the kids and I messed around with SO many logic games and puzzles and fidgets recently as we absolutely burned through The Great Gatsby audiobook (if you can listen to a book read by Sean Astin, LISTEN TO A BOOK READ BY SEAN ASTIN!) that it really got me thinking about them and the place that they've held in our homeschool high school. 

That place has been central. Absolutely essential. I know I've said this before, but so much of homeschooling high school is having conversations together, or absorbing content together that you're then going to have conversations about. Just last week, which was a short school week interrupted by some service learning and a day trip, we finished The Great Gatsby audiobook, then talked about it endlessly since, and watched a two-hour documentary on Frida Kahlo, then talked about it endlessly since. This week we'll be reading some history together, so we can talk about it endlessly, and some short fiction, which, yes, we'll then talk about endlessly. Over the past 10+ years of interacting with these two kids in meaningful conversation and the consumption of educational content, I've noticed that they pay more attention when they have something to do with their hands, and that they demonstrate more intellectual engagement when their hands are also engaged.

If they're the only people in their college lecture halls with drawing pads and crochet projects and fidgets, then so be it.

This puzzle, Izzi, is currently out of print (although ThinkFun has a different puzzle by the same name. Did they buy Izzi and rework it? Dunno!), but I have learned that it is a pattern puzzle--more specifically, an edge-matching pattern puzzle--and it's quite good on several levels. The colors and patterns are appealing, and like Shashibo, you can make interesting patterns and shapes with pleasing symmetry:

But like those pesky pentominoes that the kids and I also love, this beautiful pattern puzzle is also a legitimately challenging puzzle, with endless ways to just almost solve it... except for that one last piece!

I know that these puzzles have academic value, but I'd love to isolate the specific values that intersect with their appeal, and use those to tempt my teenagers into adjacent areas of study. I can clearly see the possibilities in computer programming and mathematics, but I haven't yet found a specific connection that would serve as a direct step from puzzle to further exploration.

And that's why I have so many books on puzzles, logic, and recreational mathematics on hold for me at my local university's library!