Free to Be, You and Me!!

A couple of posts back I mused about the classic radical book/movie/record/play from my childhood, Free to Be, You and Me.  I began to wonder if not only the the music and images were dated, but if the topics of the stories and songs were as well.

I have listened to the album over and over again through the years. The music and stories are imprinted in my head so that I can recite them along with the storytellers.

In fact, Free to Be was the very first musical I performed in at the local children's theatre. Along with 25 or so other kids I belted out "In a land we the children are freeeeeee. In a land through the green countryeeeeeee," and had my first solo with the lines "When we grow up will I be a lady?" while wearing a floppy pink hat and a too-big-for-me party dress.

This was such a part of my childhood that I knew I would have to sit down and look at the book, read the words over and over again, to get some actual perspective on how it had aged.

It was nearly impossible to find a copy of the book, and I ended up getting it through loan from another university library. When it arrived, it's cover was worn, and some of the pages were barely hanging onto the binding. It was the original printing of the book from 1974, and I feel very lucky to be using this copy for my research. A little piece of history in my hands.

The first thing that I was struck by was how the book looked much less dated than I'd expected. Aside from the awesome 1970's photos that accompany "It's Alright to Cry," the drawings and layout still feel diverse, interesting and beautiful. The woodcuts by Barbara Bascove are my particular favorites.

The music on the album is certainly dated, which is hard to avoid when you are making something that you want to feel fresh and hip and exciting for a certain era. Some of the more theatrical/ story songs have weathered the years, but the music for "Sisters and Brothers" with it's funky 70's vibe might be a little hard for kids to relate to. I may be wrong, though. I think kids are much more adaptable than adults, for sure, but it certainly sounds dated to me.

I suppose part of me expected the content of the book would be hopelessly unrelatable, and that kids today are so "post- whatever" (racist, sexist...etc) that the things that seemed radical almost 40 years ago would make kids today say "Duh?!"

In some ways, this almost already felt true by the time I made my stage debut in the show in 1984. Some of the messages were lost on me because they didn't seem all that radical by the time I was being raised by a single mother in the mid-eighties in California. Obviously, that may have been a totally different story in another place, or another family, but I don't think I understood AT ALL what the song "Girl Land" was about. The song references a place where "good little girls pick up after the boys," or a childhood more like the one my mom was raised in. I wore jeans and played sports and had Tonka trucks that my Barbies drove around in. I was raised to believe that I was growing up in a "post-sexist" era, which in relationship to the previous generation, it must have felt like. The song didn't seem to apply to me.

But sitting with the song, as a 35 year old woman, in fact re-visiting all the stories and songs that deal with gender equality in the book, I am reminded how the dismantling of oppression is like peeling the layers of an onion. So in some ways this book doesn't translate to a new era, but not because we have "fixed" all those pesky issues, but because we have uncovered what is beneath, as well as discovered how the ways we were dealing with one set of oppressions was enforcing another.

The gender discussions of Second Wave Feminism were radical and so important, and there was so much that lay beneath. The idea of men and women being equal uncovered much about the fallacies of a binary gender system, and, for many, the paradox of wanting to be treated "equally" to an identity or system that wasn't healthy to begin with. In other words, it often becomes more complex the more we uncover. It is the nature of doing authentic work for social justice and equality that there are always more ways in which we can challenge ourselves and our community to be more conscious, loving, supportive and open.

The other interesting thing, well, interesting, or sad depending on how to look at it, is that many of the stories told in Free to Be, You and Me are NOT outdated in the slightest. In almost 40 years we as a culture have not shed the painful stereotypes of gender identities, and still impose these restrictive ideas on our children through most mainstream media outlets, not the least of which is advertising.

Women still hawk all the cleaning products in commercials.

There are still "Boy Toys" and "Girl Toys," and I would be willing to bet, despite Alan Alda's super buttery smooth delivery of the story "William's Doll," that the majority of another generation of boys would get flack, especially from the males in their lives, about wanting a doll.

There are still "Girl Clothes" and "Boy Clothes, " and even a kind, intelligent friend of mine winces when his son wants to wear his sister's pink shoes.

Free to Be, You and Me is useless in the same way we are "post-racial" because we have a black president. Just because things "aren't as bad as they used to be" doesn't mean that everything is fixed.

I think that a new chapter of the Free to Be...  series, one that goes the next steps in ideas around gender and sexuality, one that addresses tough issues around race and global issues of destruction of place and culture, would be incredible.

But I am pleased and saddened at the same time to note how much Free to Be... remains culturally pertinent for 2010.