MO WILLEMS’S FUNNY FAILURES

 A little more than a several years ago, the children’s-book author and photo store Mo Willems had a perception for a new sequence. “I was considering P. D. Eastman’s ‘Go, Dog. Go!,’ which was something I liked as a kid,” he said lately. That traditional has a operating gag in which a lady dog says to a boy dog, “Do you like my hat?,” and the boy dog, in different configurations and in reply to different caps, continuously says, “No.” “Even as a seven-year-old kid, I realized that she should be saying, ‘Well, attach you! Do you know how difficult I handled this hat? How much money this hat cost? Why should I even be trying to please you?’ ” In the Eastman guide, the pets aspect peacefully, with a simple “Good-by!” “I wished to do the dog field again and again,” Willems said. “I desired those pets to have it out—to have a issue and then choose a way to eliminate it, to take the relationship back again into stability.”

Willems views Eastman to be “part of the ‘Mad Men’ era of children’s guides,” along with Dr. Seuss. (Eastman provided under Theodor Geisel in the Army; later, his guides were released by the Dr. Seuss mark, at Unique House.) Willems admires those writers’ guides, but notices that “they’re not about interiority or feelings. That’s just not what fascinated those people.” Instead of emulating what he liked about “Go, Dog. Go!,” Willems wished to create what didn't have. His duo contains an nervous men hippo known as Gerald and a heated women pig known as Piggie—“technically, a relationship between an Africa and a Western,” he said. Gerald and Piggie appear against an ordinary white-colored qualifications, so that the reader’s interest is on the expressiveness of their comparative roles, the point of their hearing, of their eye-brows. “I desired every experience to be them reëstablishing their relationship, not just having fun, because that’s a different factor from relationship.” Willems remembered a conformative innovative partnership: “We’d be screaming at each other over choices all early morning, then go have a fun together at lunchtime. That was what I required.”

Willems’s founder was not instantly motivating. The guides were developed as beginning guests, targeted at children who are just begin to read; such guides are released with a restricted terminology and many recurring words. Early guests don’t usually offer. The ones we usually keep in mind from kid decades are not new but oldies like “Go, Dog. Go!” Also, Willems’s first two recommended headings were “Today I Will Fly!,” in which Piggie does not fly, and “My Buddy Is Sad.,” in which, Willems was advised, the phrase “sad” appears—problematic from a promotion viewpoint. “I affected by getting the punctuation out after ‘sad’ so that the frustration wouldn’t experience so airport terminal terminal,” Willems said. The founder took a opportunity on the new figures. The Elephant and Piggie sequence released in 2007; it finished, in 2016, with “The Thank You Book,” the twenty-fifth sequel. The guides have marketed many huge numbers of duplicates. Over the periods 13 decades, Willems has released and shown some 50 guides, over fifty percent of which have appeared on the Times best-seller record, often for several weeks at a moment. His repeating figures are as acquainted to today’s children as the Cat in the Hat is to grownups.

Last Sept, when I first met Willems, I had my three-year-old little lady with me. Willems, who is forty-eight, was dressed in lemon fight shoes, dark denims, a dark button-up clothing, and a dark flower coat. He seemed to be about seven ft. high (though emotionless statistic says he is six legs two). My little lady has commited to memory much of Willems’s oeuvre, an accomplishment that doesn’t significantly differentiate her from her colleagues. When Willems waved at her, she began to cry. “I comprehend,” he said. “It’s a big frustration. The first of many.”

What locations Willems’s guides apart from most other children’s guides is that they are very insane. Like many insane factors, they don’t audio as insane in conclusion, though perhaps you would ever guess why “Naked Epidermis Rat Gets Dressed” is a really sensible decision. Willems’s funny relies on term option, on moment, on getting reps just right. (So do Beckett plays: “Nothing is more amusing than frustration.”) Leonardo the Dreadful Beast doesn’t just frighten a kid known as Sam; he frightens “the seafood healthy salad out of him.” Gerald and Piggie don’t just realize that they’re in a book; they realize that the guide finishes. (“The guide ends?! / Yes. All guides end. / when will the guide end!?! / I will look. / Web page 57.”) Willems’s funny is often ludicrous: the near-surreal “I Will Take a Nap!” suits in several webpages of chanting versions of “I’m a sailing turnip head!” The traditional shaggy-dog framework of “I Split My Trunk!” facilities on Gerald informing a lengthy brave tale that includes him managing on his trunk place first just Hippo . . . and then also Rhinocerous . . . and then also Hippo’s big sis, enjoying a great violin. Gerald, in operating to tell this amazing tale to Piggie, visits and drops, splitting his trunk place.


Willems’s guides emphasize me of the brief performs of Bob Ives, surpassed with the Muppets and those old Area Shark skits from “Saturday Evening Stay,” in which the individual in the silly froth shark outfit pretends to provide blossoms, or sweets, and then chomps on the leads of unaware sufferers. You have a good laugh even though it’s a operating gag and you know it’s coming; there’s worry and even assault (sort of), but everyone endures it, loves it. “The task for me is that i will be insane, but within the restriction of using only about 40 to 50 conditions,” Willems said. “That’s why I say that beginning guests difficult writers—writing them isn’t simple.” They have to be brief and instantly interesting, but they can’t depend on impact collections. “I sometimes have a good laugh that I create for efficient illiterates,” Willems included. “Because these experiences aren’t meant to be study once—they’re meant to be study 1000 periods. In that way, they’re more like music than like the ranking for a movie. You don’t pay attention to ‘A Boy Named Sue’ for the finishing.”

The kids’ guides I keep in mind from my kid decades were for the greater degree not particularly insane. Instead, they were recognized by being especially creative or in contact with or wonderful or rhyming. “Jumanji” or “Corduroy” or “The Wintry Day” or “Oh, the Places You’ll Go.” Willems’s guides can consist of merely of pc animated figures discussing in term pockets. Uncle Norton Juster, who had released “The Phantom Tollbooth,” wants to mock him, saying, “I wish I couldn’t attract the way you can’t attract, and couldn’t create the way that you can’t create.” One can “read” Willems’s experiences not just through the conditions but through the moving forms make, through the modifying kind dimensions. He said, “I try and create the psychological powerful between the figures understandable just from their silhouettes.” The animator Tom Warburton, his lengthy time friend and periodic collaborator, said, “I know mom and dad who think, These guides are so simple to create, there’s so few conditions, the sketches are quite simple, I could do that. Many individuals have no clue how much perform goes into accomplishing convenience.”

Willems was introduced up in New Orleans, the only kid of a ceramicist dad and a mom who was a business lawyer and an honorary consul to the Nederland Embassy. His mom and dad was raised in the Holland, during the Second Globe War, a interval when his mom sometimes went starving. After Willems was created, his dad worked well in resorts while his spouse went to higher education and law school. She became very effective. Willems’s mom and dad weren’t against his having a profession in the artistry, as so many mom and dad (understandably) are; they were just against his being failing. “I keep in mind them saying, ‘If you end up at work, we’ll just move past you, we won’t help,’ ” Willems said. His mom and dad refuse saying this, and Willems is alienated from them.

In the 4th quality, Willems was throw in any little aspect in the higher education perform, and had just one range. “I was enraged,” he said. “I keep in mind, I said to myself, ‘Next time, I’m going to have the cause.’ So I went out and got engaged in group cinema right away.” In the 8th quality, he was Li’l Abner. Willems was normally ambitious: at the age of five, a fan of “Peanuts,” he had released to Charles Schulz, asking if he could have his job when he passed away. (Schulz didn’t create back again.) As soon as Willems was 16, he was composing a cartoon for the regional real-estate journal. The remove was known as “Surrealty.” “I took whatever innovative perform I could,” he said. “I was never into being precious—I was into just creating things.” Willems joined New You are able to University, and when he completed his mom and dad provided him a yearlong trip around the whole world. He attracted a pc animated to respect each of the 3 number of and sixty-five times.

Last drop, the New-York Traditional Community put on an show known as “The Art and Whimsy of Mo Willems.” “My primary sensation is that kid decades absorbs,” Willems said, when I met him there. “I didn’t like my kid decades.” He remembered an art instructor who ripped up his tons in category. “I want my perform to be a reverse to that.” Presented at the show was a still from an pc animated video clip that he created as an undergrad, “The Man Who Screamed.” In the movie, a Willems-like man in a coffeehouse listens to an awesome yell; he becomes the yeller’s manager; both benefit from activities of the yell; the shouting man is then followed by a man with a knife; but when the yeller shouts the pursuer is amazed, and his blade goes up and impales him. The movie may not be to deal with, but in a feeling it has a cheerful ending: the yeller endures.

“I was into triangles then,” Willems said of the still, which was attracted with serious perspectives and no forms. “I disliked the roundness and volume of Disney computer animation, and I didn’t know why you would want these circular, perspective figures, these replicas of lifestyle, who are generally the room mates of fact. I required something smooth, and a fantasy.” Willems said that he didn’t really begin illustrating sectors until he experienced that he could attract a group that was a kind of triangular. The visible kind of his guides continues to be smooth, a silently confident, not-our-world visual, sectors and all.

Willems said, “I recognized that the only way to get to create an pc animated movie was to have already created an pc animated movie,” and so he parlayed his higher education student movie into perform doing interstitials—bits in between shows—and brief movies for Nickelodeon. The flicks were known as “The Off-Beats” and they allowed him to get a twenty-two-minute Valentine’s Day unique created, partially because, he said, “I realized you couldn’t do a full-length show unless you had already done a full-length show.” He used the unique to get a normal pc animated sequence on the Cartoon Program, “Sheep in the Big Town,” which ran for two periods. At around one time, he worked well for “Sesame Street,” composing images as portion of a group that won six Emmy's for Excellent Writing in a Children’s Series.

Through his mid-twenties, Willems conducted stand up funny, had released for tv, attracted comic strips, rode a motorbike through the roads of New You are able to, combined his own tobacco, and had a sweetheart with whom he talked France. Many teenage boys in such conditions would experience effective. But Amy Donaldson, someone from Willems’s kid decades, said, “He was maybe twenty-five decades of age, and we were in a cafe delayed into the evening, and he was saying that he was completely cleaned up, that he had unsuccessful, that it was over for him.”


Willems’s guides expose a preoccupation with failing, even an collaboration with it. In “Elephants Cannot Dance!,” they can’t; in “Don’t Let the Bird Generate the Bus!,” Bird, despite all his asking and cajoling, never does. Willems said, “At ‘Sesame Street,’ they would provide us with these classes about the significance of failing, but then in our skits all the figures had to be excellent at what they did, everything had to perform out. That forced me insane.” One of his most unforgettable images on “Sesame Street” was about a Muppet, Rosetta, who wants to within the guitar; she isn’t very excellent, even by the end of the show. Many performers discuss the significance of failing, but Willems seems particularly able to hang on to the indictment of it. He is a remarkably kind, older, and innovative individual to see, and there was only one story that he said twice. It was about a sensation he had lately while strolling his dog, a kind of heated singing sensation from his stomach, which, he said, he had never had before. Was it happiness? I inquired. He said no. He’d experienced pleasure before. This was something different. He said he believed that, the very new ever, he was sensation achievements.

The sensation would appear to be temporary. When I inquired him if it experienced unusual to no more be composing Elephant and Piggie books—I was still focusing on a way to crack good information to my little lady, who had been using the Other Titles end paper as a space of dreams—he said, “Well, at least now I have my obituary.” Soon subsequently, he said, unprompted, “I think ‘What are you focusing on next?’ is the most severe query. It’s such a bad query. I dislike that query. Everyone requests that query. I want to say, ‘Isn’t this sufficient for you?’ ”

I giggled. Maybe the issue was just conventional journalese, I sailed, and not individual.

“No,” he said. “It’s just a really bad query.”

When Willems was twenty-seven, he and his dad created a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, in Italy. His dad wished to take a horse-drawn chariot, as would have been done in past periods. Establishing out from the southern part of Holland, his dad leased a chariot, which came with a equine known as Norton and—Willems swears—a dog known as Fukkije. Willems met him in Italy. “The buggy considered something like 5000 weight, but there were clowns coloured on one part,” he said. “So even when we were dropping into the mud of a space or nearly dropping off a link, residents were passing us their children to take images.” This was not the beginning trip Willems and his dad had taken together: when Willems was 15, they stepped from Golfe-Juan to London, uk, following the path of Napoleon’s come back from Elba; when he was 17, they kayaked the Rhine from the Bodensee to Nijmegen.

Willems said, “When our buggy lastly stopped working, we came back the equine and dog and purchased bikes.” When they had had enough of the bikes, they remaining them by one part of the way and stepped the last few number of kilometers. “Every day it rained,” Willems said. “All we were consuming was sopa de pescado.” By the last day of the pilgrimage, Willems experienced so fed up that he took a bus all of the way. Once at Santiago, Willems met his sweetheart, Cher, at Manchester international, and at supper that night he requested her to get wedded to him. She decided. (They wedded in 1997.) “I said to myself, ‘If I can manage this trip with my dad, I can manage wedding,’ ” Willems said. He wants to say of his guide “Goldilocks and the Three Dinosaurs” that his understanding was that when you end up in a different story—Goldilocks lastly understands that she is in a house filled by dinosaurs—you can keep.

In 1999, Mo and Cher leased an area in Oxford, Britain, for a month; his objective was to create a excellent children’s guide. During that interval, Willems had released and shown five guides, none of which were released.

“I’m not going to tell you what they were about,” he said to me.

“Really?”

“They were what I think children wanted—that’s why they unsuccessful. You don’t give individuals what they want. You provide them with what they don’t yet know they want.”

That Xmas, Willems did what he had done for each of the first five years: he put together a sketchbook of toons and other entertainments, which he sent to buddies and perform affiliates, as a kind of vacation cards. This sketchbook was about a pigeon that wants to push a bus.

When the Willemses came back to New You are able to, Cher began being an associate librarian at a higher education on the Higher Eastern Side. She study the pigeon sketchbook to the children there. (The pigeon applications the various readers directly—alternately with appeal, with anger, with frustration, with bargaining—to let him do what he never gets to do.) They liked it. “Cher said to me, ‘I think this is a kids’ guide,’ ” Willems said. “I said, ‘No, definitely not.’ ” But his broker, Marcia Wernick, gradually looked it around. For couple of decades, he said, “it was declined everywhere. But the publishers did say, again and again, that it was ‘unusual.’ ” (Wernick has stored some of the denials, such as feedback like “We’ve got a excellent personality, but what does he do besides give quips?” and “I’d really like to see that pigeon drive the bus.”) “Finally, there was an administrator who decided that it was uncommon, but she believed that was a excellent factor.” Alessandra Balzer, who obtained the guide for Hyperion, now operates her own mark, Blazer & Bray. “I liked it instantly,” she said. “I liked the immediate deal with to the children, I liked the funny.” She purchased for what she explains as a “modest sum.”

Balzer experienced that the guide required to be arranged in a different way, partially because it seemed more like a pc animated than most shown children’s guides of that interval period did. She had it printed out on uncoated document, left out a dirt coat, provided it a discounted than that of comparable headings, and later used Bird as a repeating personality to promote other children’s guides. Willems began the tale on the end papers, rather than after the headline page. In 2004, the guide won a Caldecott Honor, which is hardly ever granted to an author’s first perform. (A season later, Willems’s first guide about Knuffle Rabbit, a dearest toy remaining at a laundromat, also won a Caldecott.) “Don’t Let the Bird Generate the Bus!” marketed well, and then better, and then even better. (There are now six Bird guides, and Bird carries on to create cameo performances in all of Willems’s guides.)

“All my other figures, I generally know where they came from,” Willems said. “But Pigeon—he came finish. He just came as himself. Officially, I realized what I wished to do with the book—I desired it to be like a feelings band, that the shade moved on every page—but the visible managing concept, the official concept, for a guide is different from the primary concept.” He included, “Honestly, I don’t think I could create another Bird guide now.”


“He’s a monster! His wants are unbounded, he discovers everything unfair, everything against him, he’s sultry, he’s self-centered. Of course, I recognize with that—we all have some of that—but I’m grateful that I can’t think about composing him now. I’m pleased to be less him. I’ve mellowed out. I’m merely negative.”

I requested Cher what had created her think that the Bird tale could be a kids’ guide. She stopped, then said, of her act on plenty of your energy, “There were two classes, the same dimension, the same types of children with regards to age, qualifications. Every day with their lunchtime, your children got a biscuit that came in a clear wrapping wrapper. In one of the classes, the instructor would come around with scissers and cut the clear wrapping off each biscuit wrapper. In the other category room, the instructor said, ‘Absolutely do not play with those wrappers, do not help your children begin them. These children are inspired, they can begin these biscuits themselves.’ Sometimes there was a lot of battle. The biscuits might be pulverized by plenty of your energy they were began out. But they were began out, each one of them. I realized children could wish, don't succeed, be upset, flourish. I realized that this was area that created feeling for them. Those Bird feelings created feeling to them—that said something.”

My little lady has a packed Bird that, if packed, phone calls out, in Willems’s speech, “Let me drive the bus!” It’s kind of creepy. Sometimes she comes over it in her rest, leading to the procedure, and the speech seems to path her wish lifestyle. Many mom and dad have said that they find out Bird too upset or too snarky or too older. And Bird is upset and snarky. Years back again, many grownups were in the same way doubtful of the suits and tantrums of Max, in Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Crazy Things Are.” Your children of those grownups are now grownups who name their children Max.

In 2008, Willems and Cher and their little lady, Trixie, who is now 15, transferred to Northampton, Boston. Northampton is in the Innovator Area, a space that was once the spot to find Sojourner Truth, Sound Youngsters, and utopian abolitionist areas. Eric Carle, who had released “The Very Hungry Caterpillar,” lifestyles there, as do Norton Juster and a multitude of other cartoonists and children’s-book writers and illustrators. The Willemses reside in a rambling Victorian coloured autumn yellow; they have a pétanque judge in your lawn and a veggie lawn, together with an acre of pristine forest. Cher has a ceramic studio space and a kiln in the underground room. Willems performs in a huge and heated transformed basement.

“It’s like the traditional New You are able to think of discovering another space,” he said. “When we got this house, there was a walls here, and we believed, I wonder what’s behind there, and here it is.” Willems performs alone, which is uncommon for an author/illustrator at his level; a lot of individuals would have someone assisting with checking or shading. He wants to be responsible of each portion of the procedure. His studio space is organized, with a creating desk, a checking device, time frame postage stamps, and a pc by of the question. His corkboard has near relatives images on it and a observe from a reader—“I like you guide s. I like them because you are all workt up ovr nu ten.” Thumbtacked onto it is a noticeboard that flows, basically, “funny.”

Past the creating desk and the pc place is a corridor covered with wood made processing storage, each one specific with a red, red, or yellow-colored red stripe, and branded with the headings of Willems’s guides. “This is where I have the art and page proof from each guide,” he said. The primary shades of the processing storage amazed me; neither his guides nor his outfits nor his conduct has a primary-color experience to it. “Yeah, these shades are here to emphasize me to be very grateful,” Willems said. I sometimes experienced that everything I observed him say was at once a have a good laugh and not a have a good laugh, or that the have a good laugh he was creating was that he wasn’t kidding.

We began out a cabinet and considered a draw, in red pen, from “I Really Like Slop!,” one of the later guides in the Elephant and Piggie sequence. In the course of the guides, Gerald and Piggie modified somewhat in overall look, and by the duration of “Slop!” Gerald’s hearing had expanded bigger and started to sag. Piggie’s hearing had expanded as well. Their individualizes also began to shift: initially, Gerald was either sad or nervous or unsatisfying, but he gradually developed some psychological strength, which provided Piggie some spot to be less than continually heated. Willems’s loved ones say that he is Gerald, and that Piggie symbolizes his buddies, his little lady, his wife—all the individuals around him who say that maybe factors are better than they seem.

The shade scheme of the guides also modified. It became lighter, and the dark explains of the figures obtained comparison. “It occurred around mid-series,” Willems said. “I would never have used the shades I used in ‘Slop!’ previously in the sequence.” Eating the slop creates Gerald convert violet, then natural, then lemon, then shiny yellow-colored with violet polka spots. When he began the sequence, Willems said, “I just wasn’t prepared.”

Mounted on a walls at the rear of the workplace was a Calder-like statue of a steel group hanging below a steel segment, and looped onto a steel triangular with a string. Willems said that it was one of his “magnet doodles.” He took up metalwork after Cher recommended that he required a non-remunerative hobby; soon he had created a bbq grill for your lawn, a screen secure for his daughter’s space in the design of a huge steel reptile, and a car-size red steel hippo that lifestyles at the Eric Carle Art gallery of Image Book Art, in Amherst. Willems’s magnetic doodle remembered the miracle of technology reveals from kid decades, but I’d never seen anything quite like it. “I used to experience that when I transformed the lighting out it flattened,” he said.


Recently, I joined the release of Willems’s latest guide, “Nanette’s Baguette,” which is about a frog kind known as Nanette, who tries to get a baguette; when she is not able, she awesome things if she should run away to Tibet. The case was at the Eric Carle Art gallery. Carle got his begin in promotion, where he was “discovered” through his paintings for a Chlor-Trimeton ad. The Carle Museum’s developing was developed by Norton Juster’s structural company, and, at its beginning, Carle and Juster turned hotcakes for guests. However area, there’s a statue by Leo Lionni, who did not become a picture-book manufacturer until he was 50, after decades being the art home of Lot of money. Willems’s information of previously years of picture-book performers as from the “Mad Men” era was expose.

I used to have a patch work concept about the creators of children’s literature: that they were not so much individuals who invested lots of your energy with children as individuals who were still children themselves. Among the data was that Beatrix Knitter had no children, Maurice Sendak had no children, Maggie Wise Brownish had no children, Tove Jansson had no children, and Dr. Seuss had no children. Even Willems began contacting deal with before he had children. But what creates these grownups so in contact with the unique shade and range of the feelings of children?

I now have a new theory: Tove Jansson began her Moomin sequence during the Nazi profession of Finland; Paddington Keep was modelled on the Judaism refugee children arriving alone in London, uk practice channels. Arnold Lobel, the designer of the Frog and Toad guides, came out to his children as gay and passed away relatively younger, from helps. I wonder if the more true oneness among children’s-book writers is sublimated dislike at the older world. If they’re going to assist someone, it’s going to be children.

In the book-signing range, I met a fresh boy who revealed me a twelve-page pc animated brochure he had attracted. He and his near relatives had journeyed from New Brunswick, North america, to be present at the occasion. The brochure was named “When Apples Come to Life.” In one board, a spud gets skinned. “He looks shy about not having his skin on,” I said. The boy fixed me: “No, he’s not shy, he’s humiliated.” Another kid in range, known as Jaden, said that he had released fifty-six comedian books; his latest one was about his lunchbox, known as Amazing.

The deciding upon had a system: there were six color-coded multiple passes, each associated with a moment port, with 80 passes for every time port. A little lady contacted Willems’s desk clutching a Knuffle Rabbit toy and looking a little bit frightened. “I only chew every fifth client,” he said. “And you’re, let’s see—one, two, three, four—you’re secure.” She had seven guides with her. Most children contacted the desk with a in the same way significant load. Willems has evolved the capability to ink a piggie or a pigeon or a prehistoric into a guide while not looking down at the page, so that he can look at and consult with the kid who is there to see him. He doesn’t create children’s titles in the books; it requires away from the actual a opportunity to interact with, he seems, and locations the focus on having a gift.

Two categories of dads and kids contacted. One boy, with a push from his dad, said, “I wished to tell you that I’m dyslexic, and, when I was understanding how to learn, your guides were the first ones I could study.” Willems listens to this often, from children and also from instructors and librarians. The funny of the guides encourages children, but perhaps a bigger factor is the way that you can “read” the figures through their roles and expression. When Azerbaijanis wished to show Latina program, a founder transformed Willems’s perform into Azeri. “They observe detergent operas in Turkish, and look information in Western, and they wished introducing the Roman abc to their individuals,” Willems said. The founder went him over, wined and had supper him, and, having observed that he liked jazz music, had the regional musician—“Kenny W,” Willems joked—play saxophone too near to him.

The dads and kids had journeyed from Hartford to fulfill Willems; He, the dyslexic son, said that the first guide he study to his dad was “We Are in a Book!” Willems mostly humor with children, but he also often says to them—if they ask him when he began posting, or how many guides he’s released, or where he gets his ideas—“Are you an author, too?” or “Do you also draw?” I saw just one reaction to this, among children of all ages: serious nodding.

At a Mo Willems studying, you are likely to choose a very finish viewers of little individuals and greater individuals who proper take good care of them. Willems getting walks onstage like a man who knows how to move onstage: “Hi, I’m Mo Willems, and I’m . . . a increase salesperson.” Your children yell, “No!” “I’m Mo Willems, and I’m a . . . business lawyer dedicated to tax matters.” No! Willems onstage is all big actions and caps, a different personality from the older you experience offstage. If you are moved, as I am, when grownups set aside their pride to create children satisfied, you will find these numbers very impacting. Willems is a ham: his ego is losing, his audience’s pleasure is all. After he flows, the children ask concerns. Then it often finishes like this: Willems says, “Any librarians or instructors in the listeners today? Increase the arms. Greater. Greater.” He breaks. Looks out. “Now to and fro a little bit, to try and feel good.” The new I saw this, I was awaiting him to recommend that we all clap. But that’s not how humor perform. Willems just says, “Well, now you see how it seems.” ♦