Hello Kitty Magic

We were looking for something special to do in LA that would give our girl a break from the challenges of Dementiaville (aka helping take care of grandma).

Of course our girl Sweet M would always go for Disneyland. But the Magic Kingdom with holiday crowds and a new and not-so-great disability access program didn't sound too magical to me.

Where would we find our magic? Turns out it was at the Japanese American National Museum in Little Tokyo where the current show is Hello! Exploring the Supercute World of Hello Kitty. Our girl was watching the evening news one night and heard about the exhibition, told me about it, and we got organized to go. I'm so glad we did.

Gown for Lady Gaga made from
Hello Kitty plush toys.

Sweet M was enchanted — she was in what I can only call an aesthetic rapture. Part way through the exhibition she was just exploding with joy: "It's just *so* beautiful!" she exclaimed. If an anesthetic is supposed to make you feel nothing, an aesthetic should make you feel something. And feeling she was: just thrilled at the scope and scale of the Hello! exhibition — at the massive, fantastic kawaii cuteness of it all.

As we turned the corner into the second to last room of the exhibition, slipping passed the gown for Lady Gaga made of Hello Kitty plush toys, I came upon signage that read:

SOCIAL COMMUNICATION 

One of Mr. Tsuji's* passions has always been products that foster "social communication." Thus the "hello" of Hello Kitty carries the meaning of reaching out in friendship. Sanrio's early goods focused on the means of communication— such as stationery, pens, and erasers — each with the cheery visage of Hello Kitty. . . . 

And then, on the very next wall:

For some Western critics, Hello Kitty's mouthlessness symbolized powerlessness.
But Japanese people understand things differently. They assume Hello Kitty's design to be an abstraction. A typical Japanese comment: "Hello Kitty has no mouth? I never noticed."

I had never noticed either, so it's not just a Japanese thing. No mouth! And social communication as the emphasis of the earliest product lines . . .  How perfect is it that the Kitty is one of the characters my communication-challenged girl loves most?

And the fact that there was a dress worn by Lady Gaga in the show made this outing even cool enough for her to talk about today, the first day back to school. As you may know from earlier posts here, finding a way to love what she loves and still be cool isn't the easiest thing for this seventeen-year-old Kitty fan. But Hello Kitty works some magic, making her developmentally atypical tastes a moment of cool.

Thank you Kitty-creator Mr. Shintaro Tsuji and exhibition curators Christine Yano and Jamie Rivadeneira! You've made one autie-Kitty-lover and her mom ever so happy.

* Mr. Tsuji is Hello Kitty's creator and the CEO of Sanrio that markets the Kitty's product line.

Friendship Movie Magic

Three weeks back our girl asked me if we could go to the new My Little Pony movie.

At a theatre.
Despite crowds.
Despite popcorn smells.

She wanted, quite passionately, to see My Little Pony: Equestria Girls on the weekend of its premiere.

It would be hard for me to explain how unusual this is. Let's just say that I can't recall the last time we've gone to a movie theater. Possibly it was a screening of Monsters, Inc — the first one, not one of the sequels.

My Little Pony: Equestria Girls was set to open on June 16th, Father's Day. That seemed an odd day to launch a movie if you actually wanted families to attend, but I put that out of my mind.  If her dad didn't want to come, he wouldn't mind our heading off to the movies and giving him an hour or two of peace.  

All week long our girl asked me, insistently, to get the tickets online. I had a busy week, so I put if off until Saturday, only to find that there were no online sales. Odd, I thought. But whatever, we'll just go to the movie a little early and get tickets at the box office.  

What I didn't know, and couldn't have imagined, was that the 11am screening at the Chelsea Clearview Cinema was the only one scheduled for the entire city of New York.  There was one the next day in Yonkers. And another in Montclair, New Jersey. But other than that, no screenings anywhere remotely nearby.

But no worries, I thought. We'll just get there early.  

When we arrived at 10:30, there was a huge line along 23rd Street with a few families with kids, but many adolescent and young adult men. We took our place at the end of the line and talked with a couple from Georgia who'd driven up to the city for the screening. They'd gotten their tickets online. That was when I realized I had a problem: we might have a Pony-less Sunday.  

I asked our girl to stay on line with the folks from Georgia and I went inside to find out what was up. The news wasn't good: Sold out. The only screening was sold out. I asked the usher if I could speak to the manager and she called her over. I explained briefly that I had a situation: 15-year-old ASD girl obsessed with MLP and no tickets for show. Could she do anything?

She wasn't sure, she said. She was trying to squeeze in an extra screening; she wasn't sure how that was going to work. But she told me she understood—she'd worked with kids on the spectrum. Then she offered, "It's really hot outside, your daughter probably can't tolerate heat, can she? Why don't you bring her inside, sit down in the lobby, and I'll see what I can do."  

I went outside to retrieve my girl and told the couple from Georgia that they didn't need to wait on the line because they had tickets. As the four of us walked in, many of the "bro-nies" booed as if we were jumping the queue. Very un-Lil'Pony-ish if you ask me, but we were undeterred.

Erin, the autism angel theater manager, did just what she'd hope to do: squeezed in an extra show just 15 minutes later. Bonus: extra tight scheduling precluded the usual reels of commercials and trailers.  

Our girl was completely enthralled throughout the movie: horrified at the misbehavior of Sunset Shimmer, terrified when the portal between worlds nearly closed before Twilight Sparkle could return to the Crystal Kingdom, and ecstatic when the ponies-turned-high-school-girls pulled together, stopped their bullying ways, and were getting the school auditorium ready for the senior prom.  

She was bursting with happiness—not just at the movie, but for days afterwards: "That movie was just awesome—what was your favorite part?" she'd ask me. She'd be grinning and laughing, and burst out: "I can't stop thinking about that movie!"  She told me it was so great that she couldn't get it out of her mind: she was playing it over and over again in her head in that way she can do that I can barely fathom.

This was a win. A big win. We have progress. We went to a movie. In a theatre. Without incident. (This last part, thanks to the extraordinary manager of the Chelsea Clearview Cinema. Thank you, Erin.)

But win or not, I find myself somehow forlorn, even bereft.

Perhaps it's just some maternal—and neurotypical—projection of mine that I mourn the reality that our girl is in high school and she has not yet made a friend, not a single one. Her pure pleasure at the sweetness of this movie, where friendship makes for magic, speaks to me of a longing to connect so vast as to be possibly unbridgeable. Will that magic ever happen for her? Will she find a way to connect? How do you connect when the things you love mark you as so young, so out-of-sync? 

She texted me when I was teaching yesterday.

It was an easy "yes."  I thought the screenings were over and the DVD release was set for August.  How could I know that the distributor had caught on to how many Lil' Pony fans there are in the city?

So tomorrow, 10am, Upper East Side, more Equestria Girls.

And who knows, maybe there'll be some other spectrum-y, oddball, equestria girls there. Somehow, somewhere, maybe we'll just find that posse of 15-year-old girls who still love the Lil' Ponies.

Socially Appropriate Behavior 85% of the Time

Last night we heard a squeal coming from the bathroom -- sounded like a squeal of happiness, but we weren't certain, so I hollered, "Bunny, you alright?"

"Yeah," she called back, "I'm just thinking about Pokémon Black and White. It's a whole new Pokémon. It's so exciting."

The best advice from the world of self-help literature and poetry alike is "love what you love." Part of a poem by Mary Oliver ("Wild Geese") comes to mind:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

And our girl does. She loves what she loves: Pokémon, ice cream, Saturdays (because they mean no school and ice cream), Bar and Bat Mitzvahs (because all the kids dress up and have a party without the grown-ups and ice cream is often involved), Christmas (ornaments, cookies, gifts, and no school -- what could be better?), cute little dogs, her iPhone, snow days, any half-days at school, and summer vacation.

I wish Mary Oliver were right -- that all she has to do is love what she loves. So far it hasn't proven to be the case in every setting.

When she's at school she also has to "be good." Of course the language of an IEP doesn't say, "be good." It says something like "Increase her awareness of socially appropriate behavior and demonstrate this awareness 85% of the time."

Earlier this year there was a lot of socially inappropriate behavior at school. There was loud hand waving -- couldn't wait to be called on and still can't. There was crumbling up paper in frustration and grinding pencils into the desk until they broke. There was screaming and shouting that she had to have her turn. There was uncontrollable crying -- sobbing over not being called on, missing a turn, or any number of unfortunate and frequent classroom events.

Things were hard. Very hard. The doctor we adore who has seen her for years helped. We adjusted her medications. We implemented a behavior plan to help the teachers understand that the aforementioned behavior wasn't voluntary -- for some reason the fantasy of volition still has most people enthralled, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.

Now we have our easier-going girl back, mostly, I think, thanks to the meds. She still raises her hand frantically to be called on. But she doesn't scream when it doesn't happen. And she squeals with delight about the premiere of a new Pokémon show. Whether that is socially appropriate for a 13-year-old girl we'll have to consider another day.