#ATOZCHALLENGE: R IS FOR READING RAINBOW AND ROSEANNE

QEFTSG. you're right, that's a bad acronym. as with all things in life, you have the power to decide. you can choose whether the thing is comedy or tragedy. and then something happens unexpected and it's up to you to see how you'll react. with tears. of laughter or pain. that's a lot of pressure and makes me cry. things don't go to plan, always, and what are you gonna do? there's nothing you can do.

so as you move around your yin-yang drama masks like three-card monte, let's go with comedy to start. and happiness. we all know Reading Rainbow, i don't need to write about it. the greatest underrated actor of all time, LeVar Burton, teaches kids to read. he's the teacher and parent you weren't. sure he's difficult to work with, that's what talent is. he's the unseen link to Poitier. sure he's a pain in the ass, cos nobody on this god green earth CARES about reading anymore! there's no more education, just destruction. i swear Elmo's gonna haunt your dreams with his HBO money if you defund. DON'T watch the Roots remake. as with anything, watch only the original. LeVar, which is a kick-ass name, tried everything to keep the beautiful show about literacy and laughter and love and innercity justice. i loved those book recommendations. those drawings of the stories come to life, this helped me when i wrote AND illustrated my own books as a kid. those poor kids were lisping and probably had asthma and autism, or maybe they were just the kiddiest of kids. what a banquet of humanity! those cute linereadings always advertised the new books better. they were Amazon Prime without the drones. you got your front-seat ticket without having to take a dirty bus to muni and wait in line for that paperthin library card.

HE EVEN WENT HARD, CLICK HERE

he lent a dignity to being poor. he was bred and Harvard but played with the running-around rugrats on the hot metal jungle gym just the same. he was our guide to imagination, as a way to AWOL your dreary circumstances. instead of the candles on the basketball court at night, you could hide under the blanket and flashlight a good book from your local library which was walking distance to the organic fruit wheelbarrow. when libraries vanished, society went to pot.

LEVAR WAS ORGANIC, CLICK HERE

i remember my school. we had a relative of Michael Jackson the King himself in my class! she taught us it was liberry. and you didn't put your books AWAY, you put your books UP. the teacher never got street.

and he was Geordi La Forge, hard to spell but never question his hardness. dude can see with his sister's hairbow. and he had a rainbow in his backpocket.

I THINK THIS IS HOW I FIRST FOUND OUT THAT SCI-FI WAS ON TV, CLICK HERE

i was a boy possessed with the power of the page. i was a boy on drugs. the drug of the Dewey Decimal System.

i read. and i was the better for it. i didn't get out of the inner city, the inner city came to me. books were my ultimate escape before video games. those dusty paperbacks with the questionable covers ripped off and dime-store mysteries and comic books and Encyclopedia Brown made me compassionate. when Goodnight Moon was featured on the show i knew that book was gonna be a bestseller. i never did picture books, too many pictures, i was in it for the articles. those prayer circles were where i first met Mother Goose. both the Mother with the goose as a pet and the Female Goose who stood upright and carried a book in her hand, both covers.

public television holds a private place in my heart.

butterfly in the sky, i can go twice as high.........cos i'm still high from yesterday, 420 24/7

take a look, it's in a e-reader.......don't get me started

and now the hebrew hammer drops. tragedy time. Roseanne on Roseanne had an astonishingly extraordinary transformation. or extraordinarily astonishing. she went from fat dumpy housewife with the peepholed zingers to facelift, skinny, and rich. the character's progression mirrored the real person. did she become fat and rich and forget her fanbase? reneged on her roots? was the last season a dream or a trick? i say it was art. i always side with a writer. the final season, which critics and non-critics alike agreed was weird not in a good way, was desperate to find a salvageable exit. enter Roseanne and her controversial creative crutch. some felt the end made the mess messier. forever messiest. others were angry. why get angry over a show? i'm not a critic so i have yet to see. waiting on the DVDs from my NBA contact. we all have heard that Roseanne thinks Roseanne is her Shakespearean contribution to literature, and it is, it's a middle-class masterpiece. that ended. depressingly. but then again all endings are depressing.

CLICK HERE. DAN IS DEAD.

CLICK HERE FOR THE A TO Z CHALLENGE