Potty mouth and grin my eyes.

Today for the 7th graders silent reading session I read aloud from two favorite passages of mine. First was chapter 5 from Frank McCourt's 'Tis. It is about him attempting to smuggle and eat a lemon meringue pie and bottle of ginger ale into a theatre showing Laurence Olivier's Hamlet. I simply love his writing, and this chapter is so colorful and descriptive of his situation as an Irish immigrant in New York in the fifties. The kids liked it too. They laughed nervously at all the goddam's and hell's and ass's. I hope I don't get in trouble for that. Shouldn't.

It is funny how kids can watch movies with all kinds of colorful language, graphic sexual situations and gratuitous violence -- on TV, the movies, video games -- and still get a little weird about what I read (which wasn't so bad). But maybe I was the one with the weird attitude, and they were picking up on it. Still, I read. I love Frank McCourt, and though I would have been scandalized at the time, no doubt, I could have used writing like his in my life, read by a caring and thoughtful teacher (or substitute in my case).

All for now.