Banned Books Special: Drama by Raina Telgemeier; A Cute Charming Graphic Novel About Love and Identity at a Middle High School Drama Department

Banned Books Special: Drama by Raina Telgemeier; A Cute Charming Graphic Novel About Love and Identity at a Middle High School Drama Department

Spoilers: Callie, the excitable protagonist of Raina Telgemeier's graphic novel seems to be born for the stage so the 7th grader is a part of Eucalyptus Middle School Drama Department. However unlike many other starstruck teens, she does not want to be center stage singing and acting. (In fact an early moment reveals that she can't carry a tune.) Instead she turns her interest into set design. She pores over coffee table books and art books revealing the intricate sets of the old Ziegfeld and Broadway shows and strives to make her productions just like them. (with a third of a budget for a school production.) The intrepid teen deals with her grandiose ideas and the complicated love lives of herself and the other students in this charming and cute graphic novel which deals with friendships, romances, and discovering one’s identity in the world of the theater.

The kids are tasked to perform Moon Over Mississippi, a musical/love story. Callie is thrilled not only to design the intricate Antebellum sets but that she also gets to fire a prop cannon. (She hoped to fire one with pyrotechnics, but the stage manager and director/faculty advisor had to remind her of the potential damage to the auditorium and potential loss of life.) Her best friend, Liz is excited because as costume designer she gets to watch classic films like Shenandoah and Gone With the Wind to sketch the beautiful hooped skirt gowns and handsome Union and Confederate uniforms and to find details for the costumes even if it means going into the creepy prop and costume vault. Callie's friend Max is excited in his role as spotlight technician and that he also gets to boss the other kids around including Liz and Callie.

The fact that most of the main characters are crew members instead of part of the cast shows that these roles are just as important if not more so than the ones onstage. The people who contribute to these roles are just as creative and talented as the performers.

Besides the hijinks onstage, the Reader is drawn into the hijinks off and Drama begins to take on the attributes of a teen sitcom or light-hearted soap opera with the requisite love triangles, more like Love Dodecahedrons, present.

Let's see if I can get this straight (deep breath): Callie is at first in love with Matt’s older brother, Greg who sees Callie mostly as a friend. Greg has an on-again-off-again relationship with Bonnie, the most popular girl in school who also plays the female lead in Moon Over Mississippi. Bonnie eventually begins dating West, who plays the male lead. Callie befriends two twin brothers, Justin and Jesse. Justin, who gets the part of a comic relief, is openly gay much to Callie's initial confusion and eventual acceptance. Callie develops a crush on Jesse, who assists her in constructing sets. What Callie doesn't know is that Jesse is also gay and is developing a relationship with West. Meanwhile, Matt harbors a secret crush on Callie which he hides behind snide remarks and deadpan sarcasm.

While as in many programs the love triangles, or whatever shape, is overdone, many of the characters are prone to hysterics and melodrama. (like most teens particularly ones involved in drama already). However the characters are so cute and likeable that it's easy to root for them despite them being thrown into the non-stop pairings.

Standing out in particular in the cast are Callie and Jesse. Callie is practically the engine, the driving force, behind the production. She gets excited by even the minute details such as tossing magnolia leaves at the young lovers during their big love song. She knows, loves, and studies Broadway musicals enthusiastically turning her hobby  int an obsession and a potential career.

She draws the other crew members into her enthusiasm by getting them excited and thinking this is going to be the best production ever. She makes suggestions for the various departments from lighting, to costumes, to acting and they take them willingly. Partly because many of her ideas are good, with the exception of the pyrotechnics cannon.  For example, she suggests soft lights for romantic scenes instead of red because “it looks too much like danger.” Also the others relent to Callie's suggestions because they know she will pester them until they agree.

 She is also persistent in creating the various facets of the set design. She obsesses over the cannon filling it with confetti and sound effects so it could create the perfect explosion that would startle the audience out of their seats. She uses the cannon not only in the play but in the cafeteria as free publicity advertising the play which creates a long line of students buying tickets.

Jesse also stands out in this charming cast. While his twin, Justin is a bit of a gay stereotype with his exuberant personality and love of being center stage, Jesse is very shy and standoffish. While he has a good singing voice and has the musical memorized (thanks to he and Justin having the soundtrack at home.), Jesse has tremendous stage fright and is content to stay behind the scenes.

Jesse’s shyness also pertains to his sexuality. Even though Callie pursues him as energetically as she does everything else, he is too terrified to tell the truth. He continues to follow her around because he is uncertain with how he feels and who he wants to be.

 It is only in the end when after Bonnie has a meltdown backstage and refuses to go on, that Jesse assumes her red gown and plays the female lead. He finally becomes comfortable with himself.

 In assuming a female identity, Jesse recognizes his own real identity as a gay young man and pursues a relationship with West.

While Drama is cute and charming and filled with laughable moments, at heart it tells a sweet story about how romance can be found only when people are being their true selves.

Weekly Reader Bonus: Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead by Bert V. Royal; A Realistic Brutal Story of Growing Up From Our Favorite Comic Strip Characters

Weekly Reader Bonus: Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead by Bert V. Royal; A Realistic Brutal Story of Growing Up From Our Favorite Comic Strip Characters




By Julie Sara Porter

Bookworm Reviews




Spoilers: I suppose I should call this the Weekly Viewer since it's a play rather than a book. But many consider plays as important parts of literature as do I. In various previous Lit Lists, I have cited plays like A Raisin in the Sun, Rosencrantz and Guildernstern are Dead, Medea, The Importance of Being Earnest, The Odd Couple, The Sunshine Boys, and A Midsummer Night's Dream as some of my favorites. I also like a challenge so I thought this would be a good try.




There are many of us who wonder what happened to our favorite fictional characters later in life. What if they were hit with real world problems? What if the kids grew up or what happened when the adults were wayward youths? Such books as the Thursday Next series and films as Who Framed Roger Rabbit and the upcoming Happytime Murders show what happens when our favorite literary, animated, and puppet characters come face to face with such problems as sexuality, segregation, domestic violence, and crimes. Fanfiction writers explore various possibilities of their favorite characters in different sometimes angstier settings. Last month, I reviewed The Boy Detective Fails by Joe Meno which explored the adult life of a child detective based on Encyclopedia Brown. Exploring the pasts and futures of beloved characters raise interesting questions which invite various possibilities.




The latest characters to have their later lives exposed and dissected for the world to see are Charles Schultz's Peanuts gang. In the play Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead, unauthorized by the Schultz Estate, Bert V. Royal explores the teen years of Charlie Brown, Linus, Lucy and the gang and we discover it's a biting grim darker world than the one they knew when they were children.




Because of the unauthorization, none of the characters are called by their real names but we the audience know who they are. When one character called “Van” mourns for his lost blanket we know he's the quiet philosophical Linus. When one character, “Beethoven” retreats to the music room to play his favorite composer, it's not too hard to assume that he is the once musical prodigy Schroeder. Knowing who these characters were makes what happens to them all the more moving and heartbreaking. If Charlie Brown can have an unhappy adolescence, anyone could.




The play begins with the death of CB’s (Charlie Brown) dog and proceeds to get worse from there. First CB graphically describes to his Pen Pal the death of his beloved beagle (Snoopy) after getting put down because he contracted rabies and ate a yellow bird that CB believed “was the beagle’s best friend.” (Woodstock-I told you it would get worse.) The dog’s death sends CB into grief as he questions what happens after we die. While Peanuts often took a philosophical at times spiritual outlook, this play puts those questions front and center as CB ponders the meaning of death.




Far from being the misfit put-upon bullied kid, CB is now a popular jock who does his fair share of bullying. He is best friends with Matt (Pig Pen) who is no longer the nice kid who walked around with a trail of dirt. Instead he is an Obsessive Compulsive bigoted, sexist, homophobe who hates to be reminded of his former life and nickname.

CB is also still best friends with Van (Linus) who is a pothead and has some of the funniest lines in the play. When Van explains that after his blanket was burned, he smoked it's ashes. (“My blanket and I are one,” Van says triumphantly.)

Matt, Van, and CB also hang around with Tricia (Peppermint Patty), the former tomboy turned airheaded party girl and her best friend Marcie (Marcy-the only character to go by her original name), who while still is smart has become  like Tricia, another Mean Girl.
Royal’s decision to make Matt, Tricia, and Marcie antagonists (and Matt is particularly villainous in how he taunts those he bullies) show that sometimes when people grow and change, they not only don't retain the characteristics that they once had but they change for the worse.




The most frequent target for Matt and the other's abuse is no longer CB, but Beethoven (Schroeder). Beethoven has withdrawn into himself since his father had been arrested for molesting him. Instead of sympathies and support, Beethoven's former friends mock, taunt, and beat him for being gay. Even though CB did not bully Beethoven, Beethoven chides him for being worse “because (he) watched it happen” and that of all people, CB would know what it's like to be an outcast. Instead Beethoven keeps to himself even during lunch,where he sits in the music room as he practices the piano. It is in the music room that after a tense moment, Beethoven and CB kiss.




The kiss causes CB to question his feelings and sexuality. He fears hatred and ostracism from his peers. The only person to give him support is the last person anyone would expect: Van’s Sister (Lucy). The best scene in the play is when CB visits Van’s Sister in the psychiatric hospital where she had been staying since she set the Little Red Haired Girl's hair on fire. In one of the two most heartbreaking monologues in the play, Van's Sister reveals that she set the Little Red Haired Girl's hair on fire because Van’s Sister had an abortion and discovered that the LRH Girl called her “a whore.”

The dialogue between CB and Van’s Sister reveals CB’s confusion about the kiss and how he isn't sure whether he loves Beethoven. Van's Sister alternates between common sense advice towards CB’s predicament and accepting her role as an “unrepentant, unremorseful sociopath and (she) has no choice but to believe it.” In their mutual stories of love and hate, CB and Van's Sister reveal themselves as two people trying to find an identity for themselves as people who long to be loved and accepted.




Maturity is a common theme in Dog Sees God. Along with that maturity is the search for identity and realizing who we are and who we want to be. This is revealed by CB’s Sister (Sally) who similar to her song “My Philosophy” in the musical You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown is always looking for a different identity. Like Van, CB's Sister is seen as a comic relief as she goes from being a Goth girl to a Gangsta rapper. She also does a melodramatic one-woman show “Cocooning Into Platypus." While her one-woman show is hammy at first, she reveals the theme of the play by showing us a caterpillar that transforms into a newly made human who could think, cry, feel, find and lose love.




Finding and losing love is what the play is about. Once CB and Beethoven’s relationship is revealed to the others, they realize how much they have fallen in love. Unfortunately, their happiness is cut short by an angry Matt who is furious that he thinks Beethoven “recruited his friend.” Matt hurts Beethoven in a way that is savage, brutal, and leads to horrible consequences.


The adult world that surrounds the Peanuts gang is a darker one than the days when the kids put ornaments on Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree, or when Linus waited in the pumpkin patch for the Great Pumpkin, or when Snoopy stood on his doghouse writing a book or fighting the Red Baron. But the kids know, as everyone else watching them do, they have to grow up sometimes.

1.  But maturity is not always dark or sad. It can also be a world of warmth, kindness, and friendship. This is exemplified in the other great monologue in the play when CB reads a letter from his Pen Pal who tells him that through it all, he is a good man. The most touching moment of all is when the Pen Pal reveals his name as CS, implying that even when his friends taunt CB and his life seems horrible God (or rather Charlie Brown's God and Creator, Charles Schultz) hasn't forgotten him and still loves him.