Characters Welcome: Storytime Gone Wild!

From a Ke$ha-inspired Goldilocks to an anything-but-traditional Canadian-accented ladybug, this Brooklyn dad takes kid-lit role-playing to a whole new level. Whether the kids are on board is another matter.

The author, Tim Harrington, with sons Casper (in yellow) and Ben, then 3 and 5 respectively

I don’t think it is an exaggeration to tell you that as far as reading aloud to children goes, I am one of history’s great-unsung talents. My two sons, 4 and 6, will tell you otherwise, but it’s not their fault. How could they know better? They’re just kids. My wife will also challenge my supremacy, but as a de-facto Salieri one must question her motives. It’s true that do I make some unorthodox voicing decisions.

My Ke$ha-inspired Goldilocks underlines the questions of entitlement and narcissism intrinsic to the text. My big bad wolf can be hard to understand at times, but I find that performing him with an intense, uncontrolled stutter adds humanity and complexity to the character. Often during a particularly long episode of stuttering by Wolf, the boys will just complain and eye-roll themselves to sleep. It can be difficult to wake them up but usually the shrill screeching of my “desperate woodsman” does the job.

Time is a character in readings of Seuss’s classic take on the corrupting influence of power Yertle The Turtle. I deliver the whole text in “turtle time,” an ultra-slow pace that reflects the characters’ famously laconic metabolisms. The reading can take upwards of two hours when done properly. In the case of Eric Carle’s The Grouchy Ladybug, just the opposite is true: The reading is so quick that I’m often done with the story before my younger son can ask, “What’s an aphid?”

I wasn’t always this good; when I first got into the game, my work was much more straightforward. The leading insect in my early interpretations of The Grouchy Ladybug was famous with my older son for an exaggerated, Popeye-like voice (“Ya wanna fight?”). The animals TGL challenged were read in the typical voices of their species—hissy snake, gruff gorilla, et al. It’s almost embarrassing to think of,  now that I read them in a variety of extremely thick regional Canadian accents. Sure, my boys preferred being read Peggy Rothman’s 10 Minutes till Bedtime and Ruth Bornstein’s Little Gorilla before I developed my technique of delivering each word in completely unrelated voices, but it was so obvious. A classic rhymed book like Margaret Wise Brown’s Little Fur Family used to make my kids smile but, now that I read them in totally odd timing. It. Makes them. Think.

Do my kids appreciate the skill and depth of my craft? Of course they don’t. They are always carrying on about “reading normally” and “I can’t understand your voice with that Scottish accent” and “Can Mommy please read tonight?” My best work is often misunderstood, but that’s common with visionary artists. My all-penguin-noise adaptation of Melissa Guion’s Baby Penguins Everywhere! received especially harsh reviews by the 4-year-old.

I’ll admit that sometimes I have fond memories of my early, more mainstream work. It was cozy to cuddle up with the kids in our reading chair or next to their bunk bed and spend nights reading chapters from The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart. I’d perform each character in a ‘normal,’ ‘appropriate’ voice. Dramatic scenes were delivered naturalistically. The Just So Stories Rudyard Kipling wrote were once favorites of my boys; they loved my silly animal voices with put-on little accents and would beg for more until they drifted off to asleep.

My wife is Swedish, and the whole family has always loved books from Sweden including Barbro Lindgren and Olof Landstrom’s books about Benny the pig and all of the many Inger and Lasse Sandberg’s books, particularly The Little Spook series. For the books that only exist in Swedish, I wing a translation guided by pictures and a few recognizable words.

For longer works such as Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Longstocking, we’d do one chapter a night like most families—that is, before I began experimenting with reading only the verbs. Our small book lamp, the “cozy light,” would create a little pool of illumination in the darkened bedroom where we shared story time. It was nice but now that I’ve installed a full-featured theatrical lighting rig and hired professional sound designers, my performances of Bob Shea’s Cheetah Can’t Lose really comes to life.

The avant-garde approach to reading children’s stories isn’t for everyone. I understand that. For some people, Midwesterners probably, pleasurable time with your children is enough. But I’m from Brooklyn. My wife can say what she will, but when I come into our boy’s bedroom for story time, they never complain. Maybe that’s because they are finally coming to see my true genius. Maybe it’s because they are pretending to be asleep already.