In the heart, Lemon Meringue Pie Lie

     At the Commissary on Saturdays, her mom stockpiles Frosted Flakes, Raisin Bran, and powdered milk. Her Dad, an entomologist, says that the Brazilian cow’s milk is churning with dangerous microorganisms, so they use dried milk. It doesn’t taste like milk and it’s a chunky yellow color. Phoebe’s mom tries to make everyone feel better. She finds the in-gredients to make the favorite family dessert: lemon meringue pie. Her mom sifts patiently through the shelves of Brazilian foods and finds the magic ingredients for a really special pie. "Things are so different here," muses Phoebe.

      Still daydreaming, she whispers, "The tradition of the Bahíanos includes drums and dancing, more so than food. Even the tired donkeys seem to trot along to a rhythmic beat. The sound of zabumba drums is in the hearts of the Brazilians. I wish I had a heart like that."

      Once her mom makes the pie, Phoebe and her family eat the lemon meringue pie until there is one piece left. It is an unspoken rule that the last piece of pie belongs to her dad. He hides that one piece of leftover pie in the back of the fridge, just for him.

Lemon Meringue Pie Lie -- Week Two, Zabumbinha

     Phoebe and Kyle buy coconuts from the men in half-pants with the machetes and their lop-eared donkeys who walk on the Praia Itapoán all day. One man tells her that his donkey’s name is Zabumbinha, little drum. She wonders how the tiny donkey can carry so much weight. "He looks like an ant carrying a one-ton boulder," She says to no one in par-ticular. She pets the donkey wishing he were hers. Phoebe and her brother try not to act surprised as the men machete-chop the green coco-nuts open. Chop! Chop! Scritch! Rip! The swollen drink cups are made especially for them. The hole in the coconut is like the hole inside Phoebe. The sweetness of the milk empties onto her tongue, quenching her thirst, but not her internal pain.

Lemon Meringue Pie Lie Day 4

     While watching "American Idol" last night,I saw Jamie Foxx and Will I Am performing "I wanna Samba".  I couldn't help but think about posting today's entry.  Dancing the samba is amazing exercise and so fun...If you Samba, you can eat whatever you want.  I want to see Rio! 

excerpt from Lemon Meringue Pie Lie:

     "Our move from California to Brazil will be a wonderful experience," Her dad’s words echo hollowly in her head. She doesn’t think so. She daydreams about her friends who live miles across the sea. She misses McDonald’s Quarter Pounders, and Tastee Freez chocolate shakes. She misses her Mammah’s kind words and her Papa’s laughter. Inside her lives a strange, empty place. It is a place that pinches because it never fills. It hurts like a cut with pickle juice on it. Inside her head, she is free. There, she rides a cute little gray donkey on the beach all day. Summoned back to reality by her dog’s wet nose, she begins to feel deeply angry, but she doesn’t tell anyone. When the family’s maids, Angelinha and Bettinha, cook traditional Brazilian food like Feijoada, she savors the pork in the stew, and the rice. She hates the taste of farinha. It tastes like dust from a saw blade. At the beach, her mom buys deep-fried, golden acarajé from the Bahíanas sitting behind the sizzling pots, holding long-handled, slotted spoons. These women notice Phoebe’s sadness and tell her to ask São João to give her what she needs, but she doesn’t really listen. The acarajé com-forts her. It is soulful sustenance after hours of lonely frolic in the sun and waves. Food becomes love. Food is consistent. It can be counted on.

Lemon Meringue Pie Lie - Day 3

The Lemon Meringue Pie Lie
By Julie Fowler


March 2011
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

This book is dedicated to:
children of all ages, who believe in the power and the purpose of emotion.

A mentira tem pernas curtas. "The lie has short legs." —Brazilian proverb

The Text
Throughout The Lemon Meringue Pie Lie are many boldface font Brazilian Portuguese words. If you would like to know the meanings of these words, they can be found defined alphabetically in the back of this book.

Foreword
This story is a cathartic, bicultural, sometimes linguistically-driven work of fiction. It is my hope that people around the world will come to understand the often misunderstood power of belief signaled by emotion and action.

It is my prayer that we all will teach our children early to manifest positive self-esteem not through food, but through careful guidance in the ways of the universe.

Namaste, Aloha, Blessings to you

     Though Phoebe Welsh smiles, she is as sad as a mosquito struggling to prick through steel mesh. At eight years old, she has just moved to Salvador, Bahía, Brazil where her new home dances on a cobblestone street above the bluest ocean and the whitest sand beach. She has a view of the
Bay of all Saints, La Escola Panamericana, and the kids on the street in front of her house. Phoebe feels a bone-crunching loneliness despite being surrounded by lovely people. Worst of all, she truly believes she is all alone.
      She wears a uniform to the Pan American School on Campo Grande. The uniform: a stiff, shiny, white button-up blouse, denim skorts, and black soccer cleats, make her look like a reluctant pineapple plant in a field of banana trees . She looks at the photos of Pelé in school history magazines, pretending to understand Portuguese. She plays soccer like him on the school’s lower field, but not very well. Phoebe believes she is an outsider. She believes that no one will listen to the sadness she feels. The Brazilian kids stare curiously at her and her younger brother, Kyle. Portuguese is filled with unfamiliar sounds flowing fast from the kids’ mouths. Months have passed since they left California for Bahía.

Day Two

       Dear Reader Just in case you weren't sure what this blog was for (I wasn't, until just now), I am keeping this blog to generate some interest in my current project: The Lemon Meringue Pie Lie.  I spent, "whoa!", six hours today trying to connect with people who might be interested in The Lemon Meringue Pie Lie or who might know someone else who is.

      According to my two most knowledgeable friends, the audience is pretty small: possibly 30 percent of the population are interested in the psychology of emotion in children.  So I turned to the school who was interested in my real education...

March 30, 2011

Dear Fellow Educators,

     This letter is a belated follow-up to some correspondence that I wrote about three years ago regarding a book called The Lemon Meringue Pie Lie (once called Zabumbinha). The Escola Panamericana is a part of this book. I included the school because it was a nurturing part of my life just ten or so years after it opened. I was there in Bahía during 1969, thru 1972. During that time Pelé was the national rage, we danced in the streets during Festa de São João, contemplated Yemanjá, and the school was tiny compared to what I see today on the Pan American School, Bahia website.

      I am finally just beginning to talk about the ideas in the book and I have this blog  attached to my Facebook page.  I believe that the blog is probably only suitable to secondary students and adults.
     I intend to self-publish The Lemon Meringue Pie Lie within the year.  I am reaching out to you, to see if there is a teacher or teachers who you think may be interested in looking at the project. I can see the book’s vocabulary fitting nicely with your world culture classes or foreign language classes and perhaps with a Psychology class. I offer the book as an accolade and a tool. Look where my Pan American education took me!
      In exchange, I would be deeply grateful, if the students and teachers who come into contact with the book make constructive reviews of both the writing and the artwork. I am truly interested in their thoughts and suggestions. It is my hope that they won’t be shy! Once I publish it, perhaps anyone who likes the book will think of purchasing a hardcopy or an e-copy. 

      If you are interested in reading the book so that you may offer a review, I will give you more information on how to get a .pdf excerpt.  All you need to do is let me know you are interested.

--Wake 

When pulled in two directions...

Having been a person with marginal boundaries and a lowered sense of self-esteem, I have found myself on a re-current, re-manifesting, false K2 life.  Clinging to the ice, my mind bleated, "Hang on." while another voice murmured, "You gotta turn back.". 

I have divorced yet another emotional mini me.  Today and yesterday and the day before that, I began again the process of building the life that I truly want, while releasing that which does not serve me.  I no longer bend to the promises (too often lined with fleece) of another's needy, lonely heart.  Today I stand protected, confident, calm.  Today I move when I say move.  I am the important one, no longer the invisible one, no longer self-deprecating, no longer saying what I don't mean at all.  I decide which people will be in my life.  If you are not chosen, I am not sorry.  I am elated as the shadow mountain of judgement disintegrates while I stand trumphant among the ashes.  I  finally have a boundary that no one can cross. I firmly stand re-committed to the creation of my life rather than destruction of it. 

Improve Public Relations for Public Educators

Educational Process: Sell it

 Friday, March 4, 2011 at 4:29pm

 

¿Qué tal,  My Fellow Educators?

Glee is changing the image of what goes on in our schools creatively, and yet public education in our backyard limps along in the public eye.  Though perhaps not completely off-base is blaming NCLB,  implying lack of progress (lies)and concluding that the system (teachers) don’t work.  I think it is our perceptions that don’t work.  I think it is our expectations that don’t work.  Though Einstein flunked out of school, he was actually a genius.  Perceptions and expectations of him were mistaken.  The bar being raised year after year for schools to meet AYP is also an impossibility.  Perceptions and expectations are still mucking up the scenery, nixing the educational process with it.   This is a battle cry.  How can our educational system work when no one trusts the process?

What if we created a media campaign that showed how it works?  It is important to see the educational process as creative, ever-changing and distinctly personal.   Because I know that you are also concerned about the future of the teaching profession and public education, this summer I want to make a plan out of an idea that we could carry out all over the district, no matter where we are.

Together, I want us to form an advertising/media template that schools could use to get kids connected with educational synchronicity.  This template could be used in any class.  Call it the Publish section of the class.  I imagine a sort of super arterial between the jobs in the Las Vegas area and the skills taught in school.  These ads would clearly be presented in a fast-paced, fun, entertaining way.  By definition, the ads might be super highways from our schools to global economy jobs, community jobs, technical jobs…  With nurturing, these creative, mind-grabbing snippets retain Super-Bowl-Commercial impact.

Investors and television media executives could produce media ads that generate this positive view of Vegas public school teachers.  They could count it as a charitable donation and an investment in their company’s future.   I dream that this starts in Vegas and works its way OUT to a national level... like PS 22.  Are you willing to bring your brains to the table on a visual media template that could be used easily by any of us?

I visualize the reverse of a smear campaign...  Our goal:  Show what public education could look like in an achievable, reality-based scenario.  The digital advertisements will delineate what WE, the teachers and students, WANT learning to look like.  It is possible that learning ALREADY looks just like the process that it is.  The effect:  improved attitudes about education in general.

How to begin?  I might have already answered my own question... Start in our schools with connections to Vegas franchises, networks, casinos...   The public relations office of each might be helpful.

We CAN do something about the mistaken perception of education if we get out of the BOX.  With concrete community connection, positive, mind-grabbing media influence, ANYTHING is possible.  When something good is going on in a class... wherever that class is being held, it could be valued through our most influential digital medias: Internet and TV, but produced appropriately so that it doesn’t run like the Blood-Borne Pathogens video.  Consistently uploading to You Tube might be just the ticket.  What might that look like?  It cannot be dull.  It must capture the excitement of new learning, showing the tough times and the triumphant moments as well.

This is only the beginning.  We are going to SHOW what teachers and students do in a meaningful way.  In application, we will access movie makers, believers, and roll-up-your sleeves do-gooders.   You probably already have connections.  Who are they?  How can they be reached?  How can they get us on the air?   In order to get our hope for public education out there, we will need investors who back Nevada Education.   The bottom line: How do we use media to shift the attitude of a nation regarding public education?  Or even:  How do we shift the attitude of the nation, regarding education in general?

Would you like to help put the intentional, focused media template together for a few days this summer?   Do you have another idea?  I would love to hear it.  Have a wonderful Spring Break.  It is coming!
Yours Truly