(no subject)
I am a sort of interesting person, as you may know. As a result of being sort of interesting, there are lots of interesting bits of trivia about me that you may not know. Today, I would like to share one of my favorite bits of trivia with you.
Did you know that I was the inspiration for the appearance of Johnny Appleseed in a small print-run children's book?
The story is that my grade school had an apple festival every year for the kindergarteners. It was a fall, harvest kind of event, where the kids would eat apples, learn how to make cider and pie and things, and their parents would come in for the day, too. Well, I had done some summer musicals while I was in grade school, and the director also happened to be a kindergarten teacher. She asked me if I wanted to come back and talk to the kids as Johnny Appleseed.
I did, of course. I showed up in overalls and gave a little speech, not too long since they didn't have the best attention spans, and then took questions. It was fun and the kids loved it, so I did it a few years running. The last year I did it, one of the kids asked the marvelous question, "Aren't you dead?" which almost made me laugh out of character, but I was able to recover, and replied, "No, you probably heard I was sick, but I'm feeling much better, thank you!"
One of the years that I did it, it turns out that one of the parents that was watching was a children's book illustrator, and she was so taken with my performance that she based her drawings of Johnny Appleseed for her next book on me. It may not look a hundred percent like me, but it was made about eleven years ago, so imagine what I looked like in high school and then turned into a cartoon.
It's really a pretty cute book, so I went ahead and scanned the whole thing, put in a rar file and put it here for you to download. Check it out!
And I'm going to be changing my LJ icon to a cropped face from one of these pages. You've served me well, Steve, but it's time to move on. Any thoughts on which one I should use?
Did you know that I was the inspiration for the appearance of Johnny Appleseed in a small print-run children's book?
The story is that my grade school had an apple festival every year for the kindergarteners. It was a fall, harvest kind of event, where the kids would eat apples, learn how to make cider and pie and things, and their parents would come in for the day, too. Well, I had done some summer musicals while I was in grade school, and the director also happened to be a kindergarten teacher. She asked me if I wanted to come back and talk to the kids as Johnny Appleseed.
I did, of course. I showed up in overalls and gave a little speech, not too long since they didn't have the best attention spans, and then took questions. It was fun and the kids loved it, so I did it a few years running. The last year I did it, one of the kids asked the marvelous question, "Aren't you dead?" which almost made me laugh out of character, but I was able to recover, and replied, "No, you probably heard I was sick, but I'm feeling much better, thank you!"
One of the years that I did it, it turns out that one of the parents that was watching was a children's book illustrator, and she was so taken with my performance that she based her drawings of Johnny Appleseed for her next book on me. It may not look a hundred percent like me, but it was made about eleven years ago, so imagine what I looked like in high school and then turned into a cartoon.
It's really a pretty cute book, so I went ahead and scanned the whole thing, put in a rar file and put it here for you to download. Check it out!
And I'm going to be changing my LJ icon to a cropped face from one of these pages. You've served me well, Steve, but it's time to move on. Any thoughts on which one I should use?