-- Christopher Morley
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Stopped by the library on my way home last night. Among other things (I mostly use libraries for their magnificently free DVD rental), I picked up a children's book, My Brother Loved Snowflakes, by Mary Bahr, because it seemed like it would make an interesting children's play. Read it last night and was not disappointed.
It's the biography of Wilson Bentley, the first man to photograph a snowflake, told from the perspective of his older brother, Charlie. The story involves young Wilson asking for and receiving a series of microscopes from his parents, and then going on to do wonderful things in scientific photography and lectures. I believe the comparison of snowflakes to individuals--"no two are the same"--originates with Willie's work. Because many schools are now cutting the arts from their budgets and trying to steer children towards careers in science and technology, creating a play about an artistic scientist could do much to bridge this new and spreading gap.
For my own amusement, I may give a stage adaptation of this storybook a whirl, or perhaps I'll use its predecessor (and Caldecott winner) Snowflake Bentley, by Jacqueline Briggs Martin. If all goes well and I can get the rights, maybe I can sell this play to a children's touring company. Like the one I work for.
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It snowed in Cincinnati not too long ago, not even a week ago, but by this gray Tuesday morning it has all melted and the grass, still green, lies matted on spongy earth. The temperature has risen. My family tells me they got dumped with a lot of early snow around the same time we did, but that it's staying cold in Nebraska. Looks like it'll be a white Christmas for us this year.
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What amazes me about Wilson Bentley, "the Snowflake Man," is that he always looked at tiny things for inspiration. Little objects, like the veins of a leaf or the symmetrical crystals of snow.
There's one part of the book that contains this beautiful metaphor. The two boys, Willie and Charlie, go fishing for trout in the clear waters of a nearby brook, and they sit there for hours without catching anything. When Charlie finally snags a fish, Willie exclaims that he wants to learn everything about it. But when Charlie looks over at him, his brother is using his microscope to look at a drop of water, not the trout.
The Snowflake Man devised a way to calculate the mass of a raindrops by catching them in a tray of flour. Before he obtained a microscope fitted with a camera, he would catch snowflakes on a piece of black velvet so he could draw them before they melted.
The recurring theme here is one of catching. He catches images as he catches raindrops, abandoning the serious trivialities for the simple pleasures, for mere knowledge, more knowledge. He runs into the storm, eager for it to fall on him.
And it seems fitting that after he had caught all of this, Willie caught pneumonia while walking home through a blizzard.
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From an aesthetic point of view, theatre is the snowflake art. It is caught by those who come to see it.
No two performances are the same, even as the same shows run for days and weeks with the same actors, just as the cold crystallization of H20 occurs differently in each cloud, in each storm, even if water is water is water; as the flake falls it sheds its shape or clumps with others; and the flakes together bring the stuff of clouds and dreams as a blanket to the ground, soft empires built on temperature and moisture, drifting, piling, shoveled, cleared, and finally melting.
In a time when the theatre is dying its slow and triumphant death, it is important for its fans to consider the words of the late Wilson Bentley, the Snowflake Man:
"A snowflake...is a bit of beauty dropped from the sky...that, if lost at that moment, is lost forever to the world."
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