You know, children — I am not a teacher. I don’t look at my work as being teaching anything. I look at it as entertainment, however there may be a message.
There’s always a message whether you want there to be or not.
There may be a message, right, but that’s not what I go after. I go after the fun and the — and for children to love reading books and to have a passion for them.
You used a keyword. Let’s speak for a minute —
What is it?
Just entertainment. Those two words often go together but we consider entertainment holy. Entertainment is how children learn to get larger than themselves. We once had a child misbehaving at our house while the parents visit and we handed him one of our books to keep the kid quiet so we could talk and he took the book and he spread it out in front of him and running around the living room bouncing off the walls and he literally made a motion that I’ll never forget because we were young and it was early in our career. He went like that. Immersed.
He didn’t make another sound. In fact, we noticed how quiet he was and we talked to him and called his name and he didn’t hear a word. He had gone out of himself and empathized with a world that we created and this is when we realized that the number one didactic value of what we were doing is the fact that you lose yourself to become part of a different world that somebody else has created so entertainment, we put a capital E on it and we’re very proud of our role as entertainers.