Alpha Beta Chowder

Last week I made my first interactive display for the Creativity Center here at the Museum. We wanted something to get visitors excited about this summer's William Steig exhibit upstairs in the galleries. The Steig show, called Love and Laughter, displays more than 200 drawings from the New Yorker cartoonist's 70-year career, including his original drawings of the character Shrek, who we now know as a multi-million dollar blockbuster movie star, but who was once just a fleeting idea of Steig's about a misunderstood ogre.

So I was charged with the mission of putting something up on the walls that would help people think as creatively as Steig, who made notorious drawings where he would begin with five random lines (some straight, some squiggly, drawn wherever on a page) and force himself to make a picture out of them. I learned this at last week's iteration of our Thursday night American Storytellers series during the summer, where Chief Curator Stephanie Plunkett led a fascinating gallery talk about Steig. She explained that William Steig was something of a "master doodler," as opposed to Norman Rockwell whose working style was more precise. Rockwell was famous for his meticulous to-scale drawings and mock-ups--he would spend weeks finding the perfect raggedy mutt to model for his paintings. If I was putting up an interactive display about Rockwell's work in the Creativity Center, I might have people draw the same person five times, just barely changing their facial expression--a raised eyebrow here, a downturned corner-of-the-mouth there. Those are the expressive nuances that Rockwell lived for.

But for Steig I wanted people to doodle. I was very tempted to do something with Shrek, because it seems so timely--Shrek Forever After, the fourth movie, just came out, and plus, my generation was all about Shrek (the first one came out when I was in sixth grade, just to reiterate my young'un status). But there are so many gems besides Shrek in Love and Laughter, and I decided to focus in on the wonderful book that William Steig and his wife Jeanne wrote together, Alpha Beta Chowder. In this they created characters for each letter of the alphabet, like Ken, the killer kangaroo who knows karate and plays kazoo. There's also Noisome Naomi, a numbskull nuisance who is nervy as a newt, and Penelope, a provoking pianist who pointlessly plummets from her piano stool. I wanted to see if we could make our own Alpha Beta Chowder--so I posted all the letters of the alphabet and asked people to create their own characters.

The results have been fabulous! A couple of my favorites are Evan the elegant Englishman who eats enlarged eggplants and Melvin the monstrous moving moose with the mind of a meticulous merry mouse. I love going into the Center everyday to check the new ones. So far the only letters we don't have any characters for are T and V. Can you think of any good ones?