We Don't Eat No Stinking Pabulum!

As a perk of where I work, I was able to take my whole family to a play yesterday. A real play. Not a high school or even college produced play, not a community theater play, not the ever popular outdoor drama but a real honest to goodness professionally produced play. I guess the more cultured would call it regional theater. Here it is the Big Time. Barter. State Theater of Virginia. Full of history, filled with celebrities (or those who will be one day).

In our household, we began homeschooling discussions very shortly after the natural home birth of our first child. If we didn't interfere with his birth, why would we interfere with his learning?

Still in those early years I meant well taking them to various of productions of things put on for schooled children. After all, we all want our children "exposed" to art and culture -- maybe they'll catch some of it. That is how the thinking goes, is it not? So I took us to these things and they were all, without a single exception, insipid and insulting. Dumbed down. Poor schooled children evidently don't have brains and have to be fed the equivalent of brain pabulum.

Pabulum poisons babies digestive systems and children's brains. Breast is best. Life is best.

So we were able to go to a real play. It wasn't very intellectual, wasn't literature, and wasn't on a children's level. A great deal of it went over their heads. Ah, but what they got "exposed" to was something real, something to reach up to. And it was awfully funny, with terrific production values, cleaver costuming and transitioning, and sharp characterizations.