John Lithgow: The Challenges of Entertaining Children

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John Lithgow is one of our country’s greatest actors . Some of his most famous roles include “The World According to Garp”, “Footloose”, and “Terms of Endearment.   And of course later in his career he had huge television success with a starring role on the smash hit 3rd Rock From the Son, and spent a season co-starring on the Showtime series “Dexter”.  Lithgow is also an accomplished author, and known for his great theatrical performances.  His children’s book and music projects, in particular, have been recognized for their creativity.  Lithgow  stopped by the SiriusXM studios recently, to sit down with Ron Bennington to talk about his newest children’s book– “Never Play Music Right Next to the Zoo.”  Excerpts from that interview appear below.  You can hear the interview in its entirety exclusively on SiriusXM satellite radio.

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Ron Bennington:  So, not only do you have the book, but also the kids can get the music along with this.

John Lithgow: That’s right. There’s a CD enclosed in the front cover.

Ron Bennington:  I think it is one of the most difficult things that you can do – to set out to entertain children. 

John Lithgow: Yes.

Ron Bennington:  Because you can lose an audience pretty quick if you’re not dead on. 

John Lithgow: Yes. I’m very experienced by now in losing an audience. (laughs) But I’m an expert in keeping their attention.  I have to say, kids are an amazing, electric audience. They are so spontaneous and so eager. In fact, they’re reactors. We’re all after suspension of disbelief. You can’t ever completely attain it with grown ups, but you can attain it with children. They are so ready to believe.

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John Lithgow Talks About How He Wins Over A Kids Audience

Ron Bennington:  What keeps a kid’s attention? Because when you have small children and you have a book like this – you do have to perform it for them. They don’t want a dry reading. 

John Lithgow: Yeah. On the other hand, I mean any parent can read this to their children. They don’t have to be me. It is fun to…I think it is great to hear the CD and then sort of know what the energy of the story is, as I intended it. When I do concerts for kids, I have all sorts of devices that I’ve developed over years. For example, I have a great big easel and a felt pen. And I play a very simple game with them called “Guess the Animal”. I start drawing an animal. Most of my songs are about animals. So, they have to guess what the animal is by the time I’ve finished the drawing. And half way through, they already know what it is and they start screaming. “It’s a hippo! It’s a hippo!!” And I say – it’s a what? It’s a what? Funny. I thought you would get this one. They go completely crazy until I say – you’re right! It’s a hippo! Then I finish the drawing and sing Flanders and Swann’s great hippo song – “Mud, Mud, Glorious Mud”. And I have them. I have them absolutely transfixed. That’s just one of 20 little tricks I have just to keep their attention.

It’s interesting, I did a concert with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra a few years ago, and I invited Fred Rogers to come because he’s the famous Pittsburgh hero, and he did. It was wonderful to meet him, but in that phone conversation when I invited him to come, he said – can I ask you a question? Is there any silence in your concert? And I said – my God. It didn’t even occur to me. Silence. He said – because for people to really hear music, they’ve got to hear silence too. Just a little note like that, was so valuable because it’s absolutely true. It’s not enough just to stimulate children and get them all excited and wild and cheering. You’ve got to keep their attention and make them ready for an experience. My whole great goal is give them an extremely vivid and wonderful experience in a concert hall. And that’s not just exhausting them with entertainment. That’s reaching them. Touching them.

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John Lithgow Talks About Challenging His Audience

Ron Bennington:  You know that these books will outlive you because people will now go on eBay and find books from 60, 70 years ago that they read and pick it up. And they treasure those early memories. 

John Lithgow: Yeah. My books, they’re rhyming stories. But I love using language and words that challenge children. There’s a sentence in this…”a super abundance of bestial notes”. Or in my book, “Micawber”, there’s a stanza that says – “A truck trundled by as Micawber alit; On the side it said, PARK SANITATION. He bounded aboard it, ignoring the grit, He completed his peregrination.” Now my notion was that no child would know what “peregrination” meant, but that he would immediately ask a parent. And the parent wouldn’t know either. (laughs)  To give the child a little moment of mastery – my goodness, I’ve learned something that my parents don’t even know. Some of my great heroes among children’s book writers are people like Beatrix Potter whose book, I think, “The Tale of Benjamin Bunny” – it begins with the sentence – “It is said that the effect of lettuce on a baby bunny is soporific”. It’s an amazing first sentence for a child’s book. It’s got little baby bunnies. It’s got lettuce. And it’s got the word “soporific”. Which means, once you learn it, it means something that makes you go to sleep. Well, they will remember the word “soporific” for the rest of their lives.

Ron Bennington:  Sure. 

John Lithgow: And a lot of people who are listening right now probably didn’t know until right now what that word meant.

Ron Bennington:  And you know that she probably worked on that sentence for a long long time. Because now, every word is important. Every syllable is important in that kind of work. 

John Lithgow: And of course with my books that are all in rhyming meter – it’s one of the reasons why I come up with so many crazy words. Because they’re the only words that will fit into the rhyme scheme.

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John Lithgow Talks About Enjoying Entertaining Kids Even When He Was Young

Did you always know when you were acting that this was something that you wanted to try? 

John Lithgow: With kids?

Ron Bennington:  Yeah, to get to this stuff with kids. 

John Lithgow: Not really. It came very naturally when I started having kids of my own. And when I was younger, when I was a teenager, my little sister was 10 years younger than I. And I was like her junior varsity parent. And I used to entertain her. I loved it. I loved finding ways of making her laugh and when my own kids came along, I started reading to them, making up stories, making up songs. I even taught myself the guitar just to entertain them. I’ve always done that and I still do it. I still do kids concerts just for the pure joy of it. They are a remarkable audience. I do feel a kind of missionary zeal. I think it’s good to give them live entertainment and to give them a wonderful first experience in a concert hall.

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John Lithgow Talks About How His Career Changed While Doing “3rd Rock From The Sun”

Ron Bennington:  You manage to do it all. How many people can even do comedy the way you do and then go to drama and be accepted by the audience?  So many people get pigeonholed. 

John Lithgow: I sort of run from being pigeonholed. Not very consciously, but just embracing things as they come along – saying “yes” to unlikely offers. My life was changed radically by “3rd Rock From The Sun”. When I became the leading player on a hit sitcom, it gave me the opportunity to try all sorts of things. All I had to do was ask someone and they would say “yes”. That’s when I first made a CD for children. That’s when I first performed in big halls with big orchestras. I literally called Carnegie Hall.

Ron Bennington:  I remember when you were doing it. 

John Lithgow: And I called information for Carnegie Hall and asked if I could come and do an orchestra concert and they said “yes”.

Ron Bennington:  Sure. We’d love to have you. 

John Lithgow: And so, bang. I was an entertainer with orchestras for children. And the same goes with the children’s books.

Ron Bennington:  But you have to go looking for those opportunities. A lot of people, once they did “3rd Rock”, they would be laying on the beach and yelling at their agent – why can’t I…?  You make these opportunities happen. 

John Lithgow: Well, I do my share of yelling at my agent too, of course. It came so naturally because I was already doing it. I was giving concerts for kids in their classrooms or in their assemblies. My own children. And I loved doing it and it just became a matter of – well, why don’t I kick this up to a bigger, higher level? And as I say, I wish I could do more of it.

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John Lithgow Talks About Using His  Books To Get Kids Interested In Art

Ron Bennington:  Well, it sets kids, whether they’re going to go off and be creative themselves, but also on the other hand, whether they just want to be a good consumer of art– to go out looking for the interesting concerts and plays and films. 

John Lithgow: And the art – I sort of gave myself the challenge. How to do a children’s book that begins to get them interested in painting. The old masters and museum going and so I wrote “Micawber”, the story of a squirrel who learns to paint with his tail and visits the Metropolitan Museum and looks in at the skylight at all the paintings. I took my own grandchildren to the Philadelphia Museum of Art just a week ago and played a game with them that I have devised over the years called…well, I call it “A Museum Scavenger Hunt” – where I’ll go into a gallery of 20 paintings and find a list of 5 tiny little details, like a turtle or a peacock or a woman pouring a glass of milk. And I will come back to them, give them the list, and they have to go into that gallery and find all those things. And while they’re looking, I’m in the next gallery, making my next list. And after we’ve done that 4 or 5 times, they go into the gallery and make a list for me. They were so dreading going to a museum again. And I said – I promise you, you will have a wonderful time this time and they did. (laughs)

Ron Bennington:  That’s extraordinary. That may be the most stealable idea I’ve ever heard in my life. 

John Lithgow: Yeah, by all means. It’s yours. Take it. It’s yours. (laughs)

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Ron Bennington:  Thank you so much for stopping in here. The book is “Never Play Music Right Next To The Zoo”. It comes with the CD, so you can play it for the kids and they can memorize it and sing along with it. So nice to have you stop by here, my friend. 

John Lithgow: Great to talk to you Ron.

Ron Bennington:  And I’ll see you next time coming through. 

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Buy John Lithgow’s book “Never Play Music Right Next to the Zoo” on Amazon.com

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You can hear this interview in its entirety exclusively on SiriusXM satellite radio.  Not yet a subscriber?  Click here for a free trial subscription.

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You can learn more about Ron Bennington’s two interview shows, Unmasked and Ron Bennington Interviews at RonBenningtonInterviews.com.