When snack time was over, Becky demanded the dress.
The boys in his class are so enchanted by the space-world Morris dreamt up - a world into which he welcomes them - that they decide “it didn’t matter if astronauts wore dresses or not” because “the best astronauts were the ones who knew where all the good adventures were hiding.” With a quiet smile, Morris accepts their acceptance. The tangerine dress crinkle, crinkle, crinkled. When he had the chance, he put on the dress that reminded him of tigers and the sun and his mother’s hair. On Monday, Morris went to school with his painting rolled up in his backpack. In the drawing, Morris is wearing his beloved tangerine dress riding atop a big blue elephant. The next day, Morris takes out his brushes and paints a wild, vibrant picture of his dream, complete with a shiny space helmet for Moo. (Indeed, psychologists are now finding that “social pain” has biological repercussions.) He is sent home, where he dreams up a grand space adventure with his cat Moo. One day, Morris is so crestfallen over the ceaseless bullying that he begins to feel physically ill. His classmates even shun him from the spaceship they are building - “Astronauts don’t wear dresses,” they scoff. When the boys make fun of him and the girls jeer at the pink nail polish on his fingers, he pretends not to notice them, but his heart aches with anguish. He loves the tangerine dress because its color “reminds him of tigers, the sun and his mother’s hair” he loves the sound it makes, too: “swish, swish, swish when he walks and crinkle, crinkle, crinkle when he sits down.”
Imaginative and wildly creative, little Morris likes to paint and sing and do puzzles while humming to himself. That exercise is what writer and anti-bullying champion Christine Baldacchino and illustrator Isabelle Malenfant explore with great warmth and tenderness in Morris Micklewhite and the Tangerine Dress ( public library) - another belated but wholly worthy addition to the year’s best children’s books, which tells the story of a sweet but misunderstood little boy derided and ostracized by his classmates because he loves wearing the tangerine dress in his classroom’s dress-up center. This culture has no room for little boys who want to be gorgeous.” And yet Andrew Solomon put it best in his superb book on parents, children, and the search for identity: “Loving our own children is an exercise for the imagination.” But what about little boys who don’t relate to society’s prescription for how they should inhabit their own identity and don’t understand why they aren’t allowed to enjoy what little girls enjoy? As Erika Trafton wrote in her moving meditation on gender identity, “This culture wants little boys to dream only of baseball, trucks, and trains. Today, the situation is improving only slowly, only modestly, thanks to the occasional children’s book encouraging young girls to transcend our gendered vocational stereotypes. Even young Mark Twain took issue with them in his irreverent 1865 gem Advice to Little Girls, and a New Yorker cartoonist satirized them brilliantly a century later. Of all the imprisoning polarities and stereotypes in our culture, none is more pervasive than the imprisoning gender expectations we instill in kids from an early age.
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