No, this is not me either before I've had my pot of tea in the morning or before I've had a glass of wine in the evening. But you know, the resemblance is pretty remarkable...

I've been teaching back to back classes this week which means my brain, now that it's Wednesday, has probably liquefied. I'm thinking my brain most likely is about the consistency of a Slurpee. Yummm... Slurpees. Do they still sell Slurpees? Now I want one. Do you think they make them wine flavored?

Anyway, my first class is called illustrated storybook and is populated by a passel of 3rd through 5th graders, all them geniuses. One is writing a fictional memoir based on the life of J.K. Rowling but mostly told through the experiences of a coffeehouse waiter. Another one's beagle character has just been catapulted through the air by a snide fox, and yet another student's characters are being deviled by flying piranhas at the train station.

Don't you hate it when that happens?

My second class is Wildlife Illustration. And by wildlife I don't mean my Great Aunt Marjorie tying one on and dancing down the boulevard with a lampshade on her head. No, this wildlife is of the tamer persuasion - actual animals.

Actually, I wish we were drawing from actual animals but I believe the liability involved in bringing a snarling fox or a disgruntled cougar into the classroom is fairly impressive. Sigh. So we draw from photographs thanks to Portland's main library's extensive image files. But that's not all. We've also been drawing from life - kind of.

I guess I should really say we've been drawing from death as we've spent a fair amount of time trying to get the shapes of cat, dog, coyote, raccoon, nutria, bear, and badger skulls just right. The kids have been very excited about the skulls - just ever so slightly grossed out but more enthusiastic than anything else. It's been the reactions of adults to these skulls that have been the most surprising.

Most adults it seems, think skulls are - icky.

Wow. Either I'm very immature or MORE mature than the squeamish grownups I've encountered the last few days. And if I was shocked at the skulls' reception I was even more taken aback by the reactions I've gotten from my dead bodies.

And by that I mean taxidermy. I was lucky to be able to rent a couple of beautiful vintage specimens. One, a fox, immediately dubbed, "Foxy-Loxy" by the class was decked out spendidly in his russet coat. The other formerly living beast, a couger was, alas, only a 3-D head attached to
a 2-D body with a felt backing but still sported an impressive set of choppers. The kids loved them, but I ran into adult reactions that ranged from "disgusting" to "super-disgusting".

I don't understand that sort of thinking at all. Yes, I agree it would be bad, bad, bad for me to take my Elmer Fudd wabbit gun and go out and massacre some animals and stuff'em real good for my class. But the fox, the cougar, and the skulls are all dead - long dead. And the manner of their death aside, they enjoyed quite a bit of respect from my students - respect that can carry over to regarding living animals as the wonders that they are.

Maybe I should teach another class - this time for adults. Maybe I'll call it, "Drawing Dead Wildlife - Hey, Your Kids Can Handle It, Why Can't You?"