Fog and Rainbows

I ride a bus and watch a documentary. I start reading a nonfiction book, a newspaper comics collection and a companion guidebook for a favorite television program. I flip through some other books.

The other morning I was riding a bus through the hills around the rim of Glen Canyon Park listening to the John Prine record In Spite of Ourselves. I don’t even like most of Prine’s work that much but this album has Iris DeMent and Lucinda Williams singing on it.

Before I got on the bus I had been reading someone’s account of waiting several hours in line to see Rachel and Jon while they were sitting shiva for Hersh. The attendee described Jon’s generous warmth and Rachel’s unbowed grace. I was looking by the dawn’s early light down into the canyon, its floor obscured by the fog that’d rolled in off the sea and settled overnight into the basin and filled the canyon nearly to the brim. John Prine and Dolores Keane were harmonizing on the Kieran Kane tune “In a Town This Size” and I started crying.

It was a fairly crowded bus and I was the only one crying on it. I looked out the window into the fog while the tears came.

“In a town this size, there’s no place to hide. Everywhere you go, you meet someone you know.”

The next day I got up early, practiced some meditative cartooning, groomed my face and for some reason tidied my hair into a Travis Bickle mohawk, went for a run, did some more artwork and then got in bed to take a nap. On the laptop I found a recording of a boring Civil War lecture to try to pay attention to, and next thing I knew I’d slept soundly for like forty minutes. When I woke up I was resting guardedly under a literal blanket and needed an emotional blanket as well.

I reassumed the laptop and watched Butterfly In the Sky: The Story of Reading Rainbow, a 2022 documentary directed by Bradford Thomason and Brett Whitcomb. The PBS program Reading Rainbow was the show where the charismatically reassuring and good-natured actor LeVar Burton encouraged the school-aged viewer to value books and reading, and this lovingly-assembled and slickly-produced talking-head oral and televisual history is more than just nostalgic catnip for those of us who dearly loved Reading Rainbow and grew into avid bibliophiles partly because of it. It’s a really good and engaging documentary all around, an interesting and meaningful story well-told by those who were there through every moment of the years of production and are deservedly proud of the joy and inspiration their work brought to millions of nascent readers like me.

This documentary should prove of interest to anyone who liked Reading Rainbow, and/or to anyone who just likes good documentaries. (I’m both.) It’s a very sweet and lovely story about a team of earnest educators and artists who really did want to get more American kids excited about reading and did a bang-up job at it. The dramatic stakes in this billet-doux for a beloved children’s program aren’t exactly some gonzo-ecstatic Herzogian plummet into the depths of madness or anything. But actually there are some absorbing sequences where Burton and crew venture to some pretty wild locales, like a nightmarish bat cave or to the foot of an angrily spewing volcano or to the set of Burton’s other job acting on Star Trek: The Next Generation.

But you don’t have to take my word for it. If you remember all of these moments with as much fondness as I do and want to find out how they came about, or if you just want to watch a good documentary, Butterfly In the Sky: The Story of Reading Rainbow is worth alighting upon.

Part of what made Reading Rainbow so fun was that they would get really talented and high-profile celebrity guests to read aloud some of the book selections on the show. When I received news of his death, I had just then gotten through the part of the documentary where the show’s producers discussed how serious and professional James Earl Jones was when he came in to lend his incomparable voice and gravitas to a reading of Bringing the Rain to Kapiti Plain by Verna Aardema with pictures by Beatriz Vidal. That was a nice bit of kismet, to learn from the documentary that Jones was just as cool and benevolent in real life as he always seemed and sounded in pictures, right before hearing of the passing of this titan of film and television acting. (And of television commercials. I still cherish the memory of those Yellow Pages ads he used to do: “No other book can match it.”)

Times are tough and we all need our comforts and talismans. I have to read every word and/or image of a book for it to make it onto my complete reading list, and the James Ellroy nonfiction collection Crime Wave: Reportage and Fiction from the Underside of L.A. will end up on the list when I’m done with the copy I obtained through an interlibrary loan. I’m also aiming to chalk up on the big board a re-reading of my childhood favorite The Simpsons: A Complete Guide to Our Favorite Family, created by Matt Groening and edited by Ray Richmond and Antonia Coffman, and a straight read-through of The Complete Far Side by Gary Larson, of which I am currently reading the first volume (I’m gonna wait and place all three volumes on the list as one entry).

I also checked out a physical copy of Entrances and Exits by Michael Richards just so I could flip through all of the pictures that I couldn’t see while listening to Richards narrate his audiobook. And I’m keeping by my drawing desk library copies of coffee table monographs of the aesthetically electrifying and intellectually provocative artwork of Faith Ringgold and Philip Guston.

Those Ringgold and Guston books won’t end up on the formal list, but I need to make arts n crafts more urgently nowadays than usual. You can’t ever really be like the greats, but if you keep their stuff close at hand sometimes you can bottle a bit of inspiration, of that permission that great artists like Ellroy or Richards or Ringgold or Guston give us to keep an eye out for a rainbow after the fog.