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Kenneth ClarkKenneth Clark
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be able to play after.

And going back to that period, by the way -- I was in school, too, early. I think I went to school very soon after these initial home tutoring things. And the school was held in a church -- probably a nursery school.

Q:

Now we're down in the Canal Zone?

Clark:

That's right, Canal Zone. And the school was bilingual-- Spanish in the morning and English after lunch, or vice versa, I don't remember. But it never occurred to me that this was not true for everybody; that everybody, every human being my age in school anywhere in the world, that this was not the normal thing, to have Spanish and English.

I remember also that in the school, there was some kind of drama, that the children were supposed to be in, you know. And I had the role of being a sick child. I had two responsibilities. I remember one more vividly than the other. I was supposed to make the opening welcoming talk to the audience, and I got up and made my welcoming talk, because it had been drilled into me for X number of weeks before, rehearsals, you know. And I also had a part as the sick baby, when the doctor came to visit.

Well, I wasn't supposed to cry. But when the actual performance came, I cried up a storm. And you know, my mother and Mrs. Husbands -- my mother and Mrs. Husbands are together in my mind, although maybe more in my mind than they were actually, but every time I think of my mother in these kinds of settings, I see Mrs. Husbands around, you know, as a sort of surrogate mother, in cahoots with my mother, in attaining their goals. They asked me, why did I cry?





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