FREE TO BE YOU AND ME
By
No one else, no, no one else/ Can tell you how to feel,"" insists Elaine Laron in a rhymed admonition included here, but that is just what she and other well intentioned luminaries (Gloria Steinem, Dan Greenburg, Anne Roiphe, etc.) are attempting in this heavy-handed exercise in the new didacticism. Exhortations to feel free axe illustrated in a number of pop styles by seven different illustrators and presented in the aggressive, varying format commonly adopted to lure kids from TV sets. But the real message that children will pick up on is that their own perceptions of the imperfections of the grownup world are to be denied. Sheldon Hamick's lengthy putdown of commercials for housewives ends by charging little boys and gifts to ""make sure that when you have a house of your own you do the housework together,"" Shel Silverstein and Mary Rogers' new morality tale has the traditional tiger eat not a disobedient boy but an overladylike ""tender sweet young thing,"" Joyce Johnson's ""Old Woman in a Shoe"" is a kindly dispenser of bubblegum money, bandages and companionship, and Carol Hill's numerous rhymes proclaim flatly that boys and girls can be friends, that both mommies and daddies can be almost anything they want to be, and that it's all right to cry. . . but if we can believe the world projected here there's no longer any cause for tears. To top off the all star turnout there is an afterword by Kurt Vonnegut who talks about the children's book he would like to write but diplomatically refrains from comment on this one. (Besides you can see it on TV March 11.)