'Scarry' summer fun for kids in Busytown
BY LUCRETIA VOIGT INDEPENDENT CONTRIBUTOR
Nantucket is the summer home of many luminaries from all walks of life: politics, business, art and writing. It's no great surprise that I am partial to the writers. Mr. Rogers was a Madaket summer fixture for years, Frank Conroy called Nantucket his home, and David Halberstam was a summer presence on our streets with his humor and graciousness. In fact, it's the rare author who hasn't visited Nantucket at least once.

One of the lesser known visitors (but better known children's book writers) to summer on Nantucket (and whose birthday just happens to be this Saturday, June 5) was Richard Scarry. Won't you take me to . . . Busytown - - or was that Funkytown? Sorry Lipps Inc. - maybe I'm a little too immersed in Parent World.

Scarry is widely held as one of the most prolific children's book writers, right up there with Dr. Seuss. Huckle Cat, Mr. Fixit and Lowly Worm, to name a few, were fixtures in most of our childhood bookshelves. (When I was 4, I wanted a pickle car just like Mr. Frumble's for Christmas.)

Scarry spent summers on Nantucket during the '70s and '80s. This was during his publishing heyday.

"The book signing we had with Richard Scarry was one of our most successful, with people lined down the street and around the corner," said Mimi Beman, owner of Mitchell's Book Corner. Some of you may be fortunate enough to have a signed edition, which, in case you didn't know, is worth quite a bit of money.

A great craft to start this weekend in honor of Mr. Scarry's birthday is a Busytown of your child's own making.

For toddlers to elementary

schoolers, get two pieces of poster board, markers, crayons, magazines, scissors and glue. A wonderful way to meld your child's own Busytown with Nantucket is to base it on Main Street. Take a walk down Main Street and point out the various buildings to your child. When you get home, draw a map of Main Street on one of the poster boards, extending it to the Wharf. Depending on the age, they can help with the drawing.

Next, find pictures of various Nantucket buildings from magazines or newspapers. A treasure trove for a wide array of good color pictures is the Nantucket Visitors Guide. (This is a good way to recycle the old ones that have been sitting around your house.)

Cut out pictures and let your child paste them on the Main Street map to create their own Busytown. You can improvise a little - add the fire station and a police station. Don't forget to add Grand Union at Straight Wharf. You may have to draw a few of the buildings.

Now you are ready to make some characters. Using the other piece of poster board, draw characters to inhabit Nantucket Busytown. Luckily for those of us with limited drawing skills, Richard Scarry's characters were all animals. Even though I can't draw a decent human figure, I can draw a cat. If you can draw a cat, you can draw a dog, a hippo, a lion - you get the idea.

If you're really in the mood to get creative, your child can design different outfits on the poster board for each of the characters. Imagine a little pig character in a Lilly Pulitzer dress! Let your child color the animals, add facial expressions and even name them.

Then, cut out the new citizens of your child's Nantucket Busytown and let them have fun meeting on Main Street to discuss the current Busytown hot topics, like the new rule against people on the beach or parking concerns on Main Street.

If you want to draw cars and boats, you can. I, however, take the easy route and just use the Hot Wheels and Matchbox cars we have around the house, as well as the myriad of boats. Sometimes they're a little out of scale, but if your child can believe that cats will let you dress them up in party dresses and will then carry on a conversation with a dog - well, obviously their imagination can suspend the logic of scale.

This little Nantucket Busytown can be played with over and over, and you can add alternate scenes. A map of Jetties Beach, with the snack bar, Community Sailing sailboats, and Brant Point Lighthouse is a great addition to their new world. Thanks to Richard Scarry, your child can get some education on mapmaking, city planning and the fashion choices of

dogs versus cats. I