MISTER POSTERIOR AND THE GENIUS CHILD

A touching, genuinely funny debut from Jenkins (Tongue First: Adventures in Physical Culture, not reviewed) on the strange coming-of-age of a precocious girl at a progressive school in the ’70s.

Cambridge, Massachusetts—like Greenwich Village or Berkeley—is so hopelessly broadminded it can drive you nuts. Sometimes literally. Especially if you have to grow up there. Little Vanessa Brick, born in the early 1960s, was living in Cambridge with her mother Debbie in 1970 when all hell broke loose over her play. Vanessa’s, that is: a work-in-progress about buttocks that she began bringing to spelling class. Entitled “Mister Posterior and the Genius Child,” it was a didactic work in which a human bottom instructed children on the differences between various parts of the body. This is at the progressive Cambridge Harmony School, where children are encouraged to express themselves, but even there a play about buttocks is a bit much for the parents. Vanessa’s Mom is a strident vegetarian who threw her husband out when he refused to give up red meat, and she and Debbie have an upstairs neighbor who’s a nudist. Vanessa has even seen her mother’s boyfriend Syd walking around the house with parts of himself exposed, and there’s a girl in Vanessa’s class who likes to flash her bottom to people. So it’s not as though the body were anything weird to her. But soon grownups in the neighborhood become concerned about a flasher who has been appearing randomly throughout town showing himself to little girls, and the Cambridge Harmony PTA has to organize an effort among the parents to keep closer watch on the children. By the time the culprit is discovered, Vanessa has begun to wonder whether the world is a more dangerous place than she had been led to believe.

A moving and sensitive story, artfully enclosed in an engaging and deceptively lighthearted narrative.