The Glass Character: rabbits

Showing posts with label rabbits. Show all posts

Monday, July 24, 2017

Cluck off!

Saturday, May 4, 2013

Good Lord, it's the Rabbitville Gazette!

GOOD LORD! It's the Rabbitville Gazette!

This is one of those oh-no-it-can't-be-so things, something dredged up from so far down in the well that I just assumed I had imagined it.

When I was in Miss Wray's class at McKeough School in Chatham, in Grade 3/4 (taken in one year so I could go to a special Grade 5, one of those '60s educational experiments that led to total chaos and zero learning), sometimes we had a bit of free time. We could read whatever we wanted. I remember reading something called the Rabbitville Gazette, in some magazine or other. In fact, I liked the Rabbitville Gazette so much that I pawed my way through stacks of magazines to find issues that had the Rabbitville Gazette in them (because I soon figured out that it didn't appear in every issue).

Even then, I was ruthless in my digging around. Even then, I was a bloodhound. I WOULD find every issue of the Rabbitville Gazette, and I would read them all.

For some reason the name popped into my head today, I googled it, and. . .

YES! It really existed. It appeared montly in Jack and Jill magazine. I didn't subscribe to Jack and Jill, but it was common in classrooms. (I got a very strange magazine called Wee Wisdom which seemed to come out of the 1890s.)

I can see why I liked the Rabbitville Gazette. Though I can't read very much of it, it's funny and charming (I mean: Zoo Gnu News? A column called Useless Information?) And the Halloween "ghost editor" is best of all, though of course it would sail over the head of the average kid.

I like to picture a magazine run by rabbits. There would be no shortage of staff. Around March or April, everyone would suddenly disappear. Strange thumping noises would be common. Every once in a while there would be a sharp crack, followed by a piercing shriek.