My mom was an incredible teacher. For decades, she taught children with dyslexia. She received a degree from Chile with a background in fashion design, and not long after immigrating to the US, she helped to develop a school. With English as a second language, among her enormous amount of grace and talents, was her ability to sew language together by the visual conceptualization of objects. This was done through her beautiful creation: “The Object Box”.
Inside this magical box, were objects representing the sounds of the alphabet: A-Z: Apple for A, Banana for B, Cat for C, all the way up to Z. She would pull one object at a time, and have her students formulate words with the sound of each object. Hence, her students had something to hold, something to see, something to say, with loving guidance and support along the way. And while she was profoundly successful teaching hundreds upon hundreds, the general public may have remembered reading and writing visual techniques through tv shows such as Zoom and The Electric Company. Vignettes with two silhouette profiles whispering a letter toward one another, merging to formulate a word. Yet there was something far more powerful and beautiful hearing sounds represented by beautiful objects to formulate words, housed together safely inside one cardboard box.
We all may remember the lyric from school days: “A, E, I, O, U and sometimes Y” to distinguish vowels from consonants. And today, more than ever letters are metaphors to the world we live in. Without one letter a word can’t exist. And with all letters, a narrative toward change.
Letters are our history. We are the objects. And our nation is The Box.
In Improvisation, to develop a scene a golden rule is to apply the 3 W’s:
Who. What. Where.
And today the emphasis is about the WHY.
So the next time you have a bowl of Alphabet soup, remember, it’s not the vowels: A,E,I,O, U, and sometimes Y. It is the Y and WHY to respect and uphold.
In the past weeks with the devastation of George Floyd’s horrific murder and the profound systemic racism in this nation, our actions and voices must unite for change. Human beings must live as consonances and vowels together, to make up a word. That words together make that sentence. That adjectives and nouns co-exist, that comma’s may pause, but no longer a dot dot dot, because exclamation is uniting towards justice.
As we reflect on the past centuries to the world we live in today, remember these words:
BLACK LIVES MATTER. Three words to act on and live by.
ENOUGH. One word on systemic racism.
We must rise toward change, peace and justice.
And the object for that? US.