What does a very, very long bulletin board in the children's
section of the library need?
A very, very long
list of characters to fill it from one end to the other.
I started in the centre, cutting my characters from discarded book pages.
A knight on horseback.
A fearsome fire-breathing dragon.
A bridge to nowhere.
Then I added to the left and right, left and right until the
space was spanned.
A towering,
flag festooned fortress.
A wizard and
his wise owl.
A leaping wolf
and prancing unicorn.
Puss’n boots.
Mary Poppins
and Alladin’s carpet on a collision course with a crescent moon.
A prince and
princess.
These all
became a back story to the action up front.
Black
silhouettes of a cottage, dimly lit.
A maiden between a
mushroom and a gnome.
Peter Pan and
Wendy aloft.
The tortoise
and the hare.
A swan watching a mermaid dive and fish leap.
A dancing frog and fairies
three.
A reader (of course).
A trio of
children.
A maiden in a
tower.
A mysterious
mouse, and birds of every kind flying high and low and left and right
and up and down.
(The blue background paper had been around the block a
few times and there were signs galore of tape doing what tape does best.
The placement of more than a few characters helped to hide the past
life of what was now, blue sky)
Re-use, Re-think, Re-tape.
