Stuart Little

And didn't he do that story about the mouse, that kind of goofy story about the mouse? What is that? Something Little?

Stuart Little, perhaps.

Stuart Little.

There you go.

Yeah, that's E.B. White.

Um, so I loved those.

I loved, like, Stuart Little.

Mm-hmm.

And I loved Roald Dahl.

So I-

But that's funny, the E.B. White, that was my, um, my quote that, um, when I was applying to college, uh, was from Stuart Little, was "Live and learn." Um, and the only, and that was my dad, because I'd been kicked out of school, and once we found out that the college, that they would see that, 'cause we weren't sure, are they gonna see that I was kicked out or will it just show, "Oh yes, they're gonna see," and so that's when we pivoted and my dad had his whole ad agency working on my essays.

[laughs]

[laughs] H- how to turn your getting kicked out of school into a positive.

I was there.

He was sitting next to him.

I had read Stuart Little.

Yeah.

The Rivendell Theater is a small space in Edgewater, on Ridge Avenue.

It's a small space, so I suggest you book your tickets well in advance for Bonnie's last flight.

So without getting into spoilers, you mentioned there's this big, Jan has this big regret.

Is there a big sense of wistfulness of looking back on missed opportunities?

So I took my wonderful little niece to the Young People's Theater of Chicago, which works out of the Greenhouse Theater Center on Lincoln Avenue in Lincoln Park.

And they are presenting a stage version of If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.

Now, when I was a kid and we wanted to read about a mouse, we read E.B. White's famous children's book, Stuart Little.

And now I think it's If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, this book written in the 1980s by Laura Joffe Numeroff, and now considered a classic, just like Stuart Little.

They can speak to us about huge themes like power, endurance, fear, faith, care, love, doubt, passion.

All of these things you can find in Northern Lights, in Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea, in Pippi Longstocking, in Paddington Bear, in Stuart Little.

If you turn to children's fiction, you can, I think, find what endures of us when all our adult compromises and poses are stripped away.

You can, I think, find the very meat of a human heart.

James got married and moved to New York, and in 1926, he began his career as a freelance writer.

There he became friends with E.B. White, who was the author of Stuart Little and Charlotte's Web, and it would be E.B. White who would introduce him to the editor of The New Yorker, Harold Ross.

Ross hired Thurber.

Did you read any of the Stuart Little? Of course! I actually never read any of the Stuart Little, but I did read Charlotte's Web.

E.B. White and Thurber shared an office at The New Yorker, and Thurber had been working on some drawings, which he ended up throwing into a trash can.

White looked at them and thought they were pretty good, so he submitted them to The New Yorker for publication, and they did publish them, and this began Thurber's decades-long career of contributing drawings and writings to The New Yorker.