2009 Ending with a BANG
Posted by Amanda Farrar on December 28, 2009
Hey everybody!
Holy moly. What an excellent 2009 for Barrel of Monkeys it has been. And, because you are awesome, you are making even the last week of the year extraordinary! We sold out the house at “That’s Weird, Grandma” last week (Sorry to the group of Monkey fans where weren’t able to make it inside!!), and we are on our way to selling out again tonight, so buy your tickets now or call the hotline and make reservations so we don’t have to see sad faces tonight. Please, no sad faces.
Also! We are delighted (absolutely delighted) to have the cost of what it takes to bring 48 stories from CPS students to life donated by our marvelous supporters in our “Sponsor a Story” campaign (mad props to Monkey fan Erik). It’s not too late to give $10 to help bring a story like this one from Omar M., 3rd grade at Lafayette to life (see this story enacted TONIGHT):
“The Snowman from Pluto was very friendly to his friends. His friends were Larry the acrobatic snowman, and Joshua the dancing snowman. They all performed an act. They all lived in Pluto. They liked Pluto. Pluto was nice and cold for them. The people paid them 25 cents for every show they do. They made an act so they could get the golden razor scooter. They wanted that more than anything in the galaxy. They had finally got what they wanted the golden razor scooter, each of them got one. But one day a bully took their beautiful scooters. But they didn’t know who took them. Until they saw the bully and his friends riding with their scooters. They couldn’t get the scooters back from the bullies so they tricked the bullies. They made a scooter that wasn’t a real scooter just a replica. So the bully has seen the scooter so he gave them back and played with the replica so the snowmen were happy. And they still kept doing new acts and got more money.”
Priceless. But, for $10, you can help make a story like this possible. I know you hear stuff like that a lot lately, but imagine all the smiles this story has already brought to so many faces, than times that by infinity, and that is how bright and shiny the students’ faces are to see their stories performed. Like big stars that hurt your eyes they are so brilliant. That’s what we help make happen. You can help make it happen, too. You will like it.
In conclusion, THANK YOU for making 2009 a fabulastic year. Yeah – it was so good, I had to make up a word to describe it. This year, we helped almost 1,000 students write more than 4,500 stories and performed for approximately 6,500 folks who are young, old, and everything in between. Perhaps Elsa Carmona, principal of Little Village Academy, summed up what we do best in a recent article on BOM in the Tribune:
“Writing is one area our kids need work, and the way they pull out a child’s voice – my kids fall out of chairs laughing. They don’t know they’re learning, and my (standardized test scores) for reading and writing increased since we started with them.” In 2005, when she hired Barrel of Monkeys, 49 percent of her third- and fourth-grade students were reading at or above their class level, she said. “Now it’s above 70 (percent),” she said, citing the Monkeys as a major reason.
What will 2010 bring? Probably not the flying cars we’ve been promised, but I’ll take the amazing stories written by kids over a flying car any day. Thanks for helping make it all possible.