Parallels

Since it's pointless to blog about Figure Skating (see post below), at least I can still blog about Wikipedia. I wanted to point this out some way, but it didn't seem to fit on my user page, and it certainly doesn't fit on an article talk page.

Two of my main projects in the last several months are I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Sesame Street. After a flurry of editing on Caged Bird before the holidays, it's currently in a holding pattern waiting for another editor to look it over before we get more feedback before it's submitted to become a featured article. My goal is to have it FA sometime this year, the 40th anniversary of the book's publication.

While waiting, I took on the Sesame Street article. Up to this week, I was in the "research phase of article development." Basically, that means reading: G is For Growing, which is a compilation of research done on the show, and the new book, Street Gang, by Michael Davis. The latter book is delightful, and full of all kinds of usable information for the article. I highly recommend it; not only does it cover the history of Sesame Street; it covers the history of television, children's TV in particular.

What I found interesting, though, is that both of my main recent WP projects were both created 40 years ago. (I may not get the Sesame Street article to FA by November, which is the show's anniversary, but I may be able to get History of Sesame Street to that point, since it's more manageable.) The even more interesting thing is that both Sesame Street and Caged Bird were created out of dinner parties.

Jean Ganz Cooney hosted a dinner in 1966, and the discussion of the guests led directly to the creation of the show. In 1968, Maya Angelou attended a dinner party at the home of cartoonist Jules Feiffer and the discussion about Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination and their childhoods inspired Angelou to write her autobiography. I don't know what it says about me and my obsessions with the material in both articles, but the parallel is too interesting to let pass by.

The other thing to note has only to do with Sesame Street. In 1969, when the show premiered, I was five years old, the very end of the population the producers and creators wanted to reach. As I read Davis' book, it struck me: all this was done for me! Perhaps that's egocentric, but I became teary-eyed as I realized that. For me, and for my beautiful disabled children, who can recite the alphabet in large part due to the show.

Perhaps Angelou wrote Caged Bird for me as well; so that I can learn about racism the first time I read it as a young college student, and the research I've done this year, the year we elected a black man as President of the United States.