Learning Day: Once I Was A... 🌭

Doris Sanford and Graci Evans create illustrated guides to childhood problems, and no one has ever done it worse. They solve abuse with insanity and foster care with racism. They solve divorce with Satan and AIDS with strangling. And in 1990, these passionate and dog-brained ladies published a series of four books called ONCE I WAS A ________… and You’ll Never Guess What Happened.

We’re going to start with ONCE I WAS A BULLY… because it’s  the only one I have with all the accessories. Each book originally came  with a paper doll of the main character you could slide into little  slots in a way the most generous five-year-old would call “pointless.”  I’m not even sure what they were going for. A weird boy peeking through  an unrelated hole in the universe? It’s nonsense. It’s something an AI  would generate if you asked it to write your seminary school paper.  Anyway, this paper doll is a dick and he picks on a boy named Jason.

Honestly, Jason seems fine. “Fuck you and fuck this,” he says to our  bully, and that’s it for the bullying part of the book. I want to be  clear on this: after one page we are done with the exposition, character  development, and plot. It’s time to learn our lesson.

The very next page, the bully goes to a monster movie and dissociates  in fear. It has nothing to do with Jason because Doris and Graci don’t  think like normal children’s book authors. They think more like a salmon  getting slapped out of the air by a grizzly bear. If you put a human  head in a dryer and asked it how to solve friendship, it would scream a  Doris Sanford book. Like how our bully now imagines he is kayaking in a  sewer and then gets swallowed by a shark.

What does this have to do with bullying or bullying consequences?  Nothing. This is the world’s worst dad shrugging his way through a  bedtime story. The shark spits him up in, fuck who cares… Japan, I  guess?

The bully takes in a sumo match which Doris explains is sort of like a  place where fat guys get together to make fun of girl haircuts. They  could have called this “I’m Just Todd, And This is Just Some Dumb Dream I Had… A Just Nothing Book For Dull Idiots”  and it would have been fine. But they sold this like it would teach us  something. In fact, the back of the book specifically states how  critical it is to not fail at this task they are carelessly fucking up.

This was supposed to teach children to treat others with respect?  How? The boy went straight from bullying to the movies to a dreamscape  of adventure. He is one page away from having toys magically come to  life.

I wasn’t kidding. Our hero is learning his lesson by meeting a group  of rad dinosaurs and hot ladies. Things could not be going better for  him. If I know anything about bully dreams, and I think I do, things are  about to get steamy.

That’s not what I meant, but okay. This is such a cute encapsulation  of the broken wrongness of Doris Sanford and Graci Evans. Like, what is  this? Forget how far we are from the stated goal of the book. This is a  slot for a paper doll to make it look like he’s standing in his own back  pocket while a dinosaur head is down his pants. This is how a ’90s  movie would CGI a black hole appearing in a child’s brain– the final  violent thoughts of Stephen King’s The Lawnmower Boy.

“So then, uh, robots attack… nutcrackers,” adds the very good writer  looking around her apartment. If we’re being charitable I think our  bully is supposed to be learning about the nature of fear, possibly to  understand what it would have been like if he had frightened the child  who dismissed him on page one. It’s a stretch, but the alternative  –these crafty ladies are fucking stupid– is too predictable to consider.

As quickly and as pointlessly as it started, the adventure ends.  Whew! Our bully almost had to see a nutcracker get torn apart by robots  during a fun hallucination at the movies. Those couldn’t have been the  stakes, yet they were. It’s the first book written entirely during a 20  minute electrocution and drawn during a 70 year virginity.

What? That’s it? Nothing here ever got related to a second thing. Are  there even words to help understand what has been done here? This is  like teaching children politeness by awarding a historic pizza “Best  Fish.” The book failed every step of the way here and then blew it on  the final lesson. Because, one, being scared is clearly super fun. And  two, look at Jason. He’s got his own clothing line. Jason doesn’t give a  fuck about you. Why would he? It seems outrageous I need to say this,  Doris Sanford, but thinking about random things while watching a movie  by yourself isn’t an apology. If a loaf of bread grew this, you’d say  “wow, this mold almost looks like a story.”

Let’s see if they do better with the next one.

ONCE I TOLD A LIE… and You’ll Never Guess What Happened originally came with a paper doll of a little blonde liar, but someone  in Mrs. McKinnon’s class tore her off and lost her. Again, every page  has a hole for no coherent reason. Again, it’s like the dumbest caveman  tried to invent a pop-up book. Again, it’s because the only real thing  this series has to teach us is how books cannot defend against a chisel  attack.

After an undisclosed lie, a daughter is sent to her room. To  represent her, I’m using the bully from the last book– the grouchy  bastard who learned nothing. This insufferable little shit.

The liar immediately jumps out the window…

… and goes on a wild adventure around the world. She goes to many  disconnected places, learning nothing and doing less. Sometimes it’s  fine. Other times it’s only okay. The liar ends up in a “deep cave,”  “Africa,” and “Iowa.” She starts to have fun when she meets some  friendly native North Polians because Doris is an elderly white woman in  1990…

… but gets mistaken for a small fish in Miami because most of Doris’s skull was hollowed out by parasites in 1989.

In a weird move for a little girl learning the dangers of lying, she  takes thirty pounds of snacks up to the counter and tells the cashier,  “I’m not paying for any of this.”

She’s arrested, and you can see this isn’t a good story. It’s a  series of bland “and thens” ad-libbed by an amateur encyclopedia owner. I  don’t care, and who would? It’d be like criticizing a cow for digesting  grass in the wrong stomach compartment. Abomasum? Ha, nice fucking  choice, cow. No, what’s frustrating to me is how much  it absolutely isn’t a lesson about lying. It’s a story about an aimless  girl wandering honestly, and yet here is the lesson it was leading to:

She’s decided to NEVER, NEVER, NEVER lie again? Why? She took a  roadtrip to a failed candy negotiation, and it was either a magical  adventure or an attic hallucination. None of it taught anyone anything.  I’d say this was like teaching someone the power of honesty by blurting  out “I went to Iowa before getting arrested for ice cream,” but that’s  literally what happened here. That’s what we just read.

So, gasp, it was all a trick? The fictional child didn’t  travel around the world and spend a weekend at the north pole in an  afternoon? She was a liar, here are some more of her lies, the end? But  wait, if none of it happened, why Iowa? Less importantly, why any of it?  This is, with scientific precision, the least a book could teach you  about the consequences of lying. If you think it’s easy to make a  children’s book, ONCE I TOLD A LIE… and You’ll Never Guess What Happened will make you say, “My God, what else am I wrong about.” Reading it is  like watching someone get out of a cab with most of a dog and  whispering, “I trained this horse to count,” only for kids.

Our next book is called ONCE I WAS OBNOXIOUS… and You’ll Never Guess What Happened.  It was supposed to come with an Asian school girl paper doll, but her  pouch has long since been torn off. She was gone decades ago. We all  know the terrible world we live in. No one has ever said, “This  detachable Asian school girl paper doll will certainly be safe here: on  this public library book.” So we’re going to have to use the bully prick  again.

The obnoxious girl and her friend, Millicent Ann Louise, write mean  notes like, and I quote, “ROTTEN ROBERT, I HATE YOU!” and “HA HA HA HA  HA ON YOU.” She thinks these are devastating, so like the bully, our  hero might be overestimating the effect of her cruelty. Seriously,  obnoxious girl, the recipient of “HA HA HA HA HA ON YOU,” doesn’t need  you to atone. There’s no victim here. “Rotten” Robert sees this like a  chimpanzee accidentally giving him the middle finger.

Like the pattern we’ve established, we learn about the hero’s  personality disorder and immediately follow them on some imaginary  journey. But this time it’s at least related to the problem because she  and Millicent travel around the world being very obnoxious. It’s a book  about two girls being insufferable dicks in different locations, and  it’s the clearest artistic vision Doris and Graci have had in years.

They go to the moon and Egypt, where the author forgets to make them  obnoxious, but they make up for it by visiting the Great Wall of China  and spitting on the locals. Next they take a caravan to the  zoo, partly because nothing here means anything, partly because these  worldly authors thought Chinese passenger vehicles were still donkeys in  1990.

At the zoo, the girls pelt a hippo with rocks until it agrees to take  them to a sunken treasure boat. I’d argue this did not help them learn  why being obnoxious is bad. They cut in line to get on a hang-glider and  take it to the Natural History Museum where they really raise the  stakes:

“What are the statues at the entrance to the Natural History Museum?  Gerbils?” asked illustrator Graci. And writer Doris replied the same way  she always did: “I tried to swallow a hot dog, and set the hospital  record for longest time spent legally dead!”

The two girls finally go too far when they touch a “DO NOT TOUCH”  sign. Not the thing it was telling viewers not to touch, but the sign  itself. We can’t be sure if this is a cute joke or another fundamental  chunk of brain missing from the author.

They are sentenced to four years of solitary confinement with a  number of strange details written by a person trying to be silly and,  like in all their other efforts, failing.

Because of their good behavior, the girls get to finish their prison  time with adult criminals, singing in the choir and making license  plates. It’s so goddamn weird. They’re locked up in prison for a third  of this book. I guess the judge knew he couldn’t get a hippo stoning or  China spitting conviction, so he came down on the girls hard for the  sign touching charges.

I can’t imagine anyone or anything improving from any of this, but at  least something bad is happening to shitheads. I’m American enough to  call that a win for the justice system. This is a pretty decent effort,  Doris and Graci! You even remembered to include a real moral:

“Hi, Robert. It’s been… wow, five years since I wrote HA HA HA HA HA  ON YOU. Well, I’m out and I’ve had time to refl– what do you mean, who  is this? This is Millicent Ann Louise, Snitch Killer of Cell Block D! I  tormented you all through third gra– he hung up.”

So okay, we’ve now read about bullying, lying, and obnoxiousness with  Doris and Graci almost making a case against the last one. But moral  relativists could argue those concepts are too abstract to solve. Let’s  see if Doris and Graci can teach children about something more  objectively wrong. Let’s see how they handle stealing.

In a storytelling choice I personally wouldn’t have made, the star of ONCE I WAS A THIEF… and You’ll Never Guess What Happened is a young Latino immigrant. But this book has ironically been stripped  of its thief doll, so we’ll have to use the bully again. The little  paper son of a bitch.

The thief took $1.74 and some snail remains from Robert. I don’t know  if all children in this universe choose Robert as their victim or if  Doris is using her art to work through some things involving a  treacherous Robert in her own life. Speaking of the author, can you see  the mistake she made here? That’s right! In the very same paragraph we  learn of the crime, we also see the solution and the aftermath. Doris  accidentally finished the story on the first page! Whoops!

So with nothing left to do, the hero takes a nap.

It goes about as disastrously as a nap can go.

“What’s the deal with hospital food, am I right? Could there be a more wild assortment of various foods?” jokes Doris. “We won’t know  the full extent of the brain damage until we get all the hot dog out of  her lungs,” say her nearby doctors.

After stealing fourteen lunches from his nurses, the boy escapes to  Brazil where Doris and Graci agree they speak Spanish. And the birds  there can tell what he’s done. “Señor Thief! Señor Thief!” the parrots  squawk, in perfect Spanish, the native tongue of Brazil. It’s like the Tell Tale Heart only with higher stakes.

He stays one step ahead of the police by fleeing to the sky,  Australia, and Mayan Indian ruins before ending up in a Korean  sweatshop. He works there for three weeks, but our hero, further  referred to as Señor Thief, can’t resist stealing a paw squeaker from  the assembly line. You know what happens next.

That’s right. Thirty two fucking years of hard labor filling tear buckets at a royal llama farm.

Señor Thief’s father is the king, and he’s here to see if the boy who  learned his lesson on page one learned it again after all this nonsense  bullshit.

Señor Thief’s dad, THE KING, comes up with precisely the same  solution as when Señor Thief was awake. Yeah, we know, book. Give the  stolen things back and apologize. Am I fucking crazy? You said it twenty  pages ago. I guess the book’s lesson is yada yada, sure, don’t steal,  but if you do you need to relive a more surreal version of the crime  while you’re asleep. It’s the only way to free yourself from the guilt.  Speaking of free…

“Oh fuck yeah,” is what Graci Evans says when you ask her if she can draw “FREE!”

“We forgive you,” shouts everyone! From the hungry, peach-headed  nurses here in America to the owners of squeakless teddy bears deep in  the mysterious Orient, all the lives shattered by Señor Thief are whole  again. I can’t imagine a more wonderful ending. Stealing solved, five  stars.

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This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Joseph Searles, who once talked during a movie and went on a magical journey where he romanced a tiger and then died in prison.

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