MOLI VIEW™

Lots of inner city kids never leave their neighborhoods. That's too bad. But what I didn't know, until recently, was that lots of inner city kids never even leave the hood in their imaginations. That's tragic. I found this out while working with a particularly rambunctious crowd of teens at the Miami Bridge youth crisis shelter in one of our regular Monday night sessions. The week before we'd made masks out of construction paper. A few of the guys made "goons," gang members in caps with gold teeth. One of the young women added long, gangly legs to her mask, so it was almost a puppet. Another added long fringed hair, like dreadlocks. These characters had so much life that I brought them back the next week to see if we could put together a little theater.

Right away the kids hit on familiar themes: fights, robberies, drug deals, sex, and AIDS. Okay, sure, that's all important to talk about – but the puppet masters seemed to have a hard time disassociating the characters from themselves.

"Uh, uh, I didn't do that," one would protest when a peer suggested a bit of action.

"The character is not you," I kept interjecting, in vain.

Thinking it might be a little easier to get some distance if we treated less immediate topics, I tried to inject a bit of fantasy.

"What if, when these two guys fight, instead of just shooting at each other, something magical happens? What if the bullets turn into butterflies or one of the guys suddenly flies away?"

Maybe not the best idea, but I was trying to get them to come up with something fantastic.

One young man started to talk about some of the characters in his neighborhood.

"There's this crackhead named Frog who hangs out behind Miss Betty's store," he said, eliciting cries of recognition from others who lived nearby.

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