Go, Go, Go Sis!

When we were sitting in the pediatrician's waiting room the other day, Sis found a book entitled, "Joseph's Rainbow Coat." It was not a standard format, but a shaped book held together with a brad or something like in one corner. She was intrigued.

Turns out, it was a very religious book about God helping people not get angry when other people do them wrong--one side was the biblical story and the other was the modern parallel for kids. It boiled the story down to four sentences, mainly: Joseph had a rainbow coat. His brothers didn't like him and sold him to people who took him far away. Joseph was scared and prayed to God for help. God helped Joseph.

Sis had me read the Joseph part (not the modern parallel) over and over and over again. And I just couldn't figure out what she saw in the story, nothing against the original story, but this was an awful retelling.

She liked the pink stripe in the picture of Joseph's coat!

But then she became intrigued with the rest of it. Why didn't his brothers like him? Why did they sell him? Why was he scared?

So I told her the rest of the story, as I knew it, about Joseph's dreams, the jealousy of the brothers, "being sent away to work for mean people in Egypt" (I mean, that's about all I could say about slavery to a not-quite-four-year-old), then helping the pharaoh (who was dreaming about cows--she loved that part!), becoming really important, and meeting his brothers again at the end.

She wondered if we had the book--I had mentioned the Bible--at home. My mind flashed to those ubiquitous blue-covered, hard-bound Bible stories for children illustrated books found in every waiting room in America in the 1970s. But no, we didn't have a children's version of the Bible (and would have difficulty laying our hands on an adult version for that matter. NOTE to friends and family: PLEASE, no illustrated Bible stories for their birthday! The retellings of the stories are awful and the illustrations are even worse). I told her I had read it but knew it better from a musical.

That's right, I based my biblical teachings on Andrew Lloyd Webber's Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (I'm also partial to The Ten Commandments, but that's a different story). It was the first Webber musical I ever saw, probably three decades ago, in our season subscription back in Houston. With David Cassidy. And I had loved it. I still know all the words. And so I started to sing for Sis the rainbow coat song.

And she loved it. When we got home later, she had me play the entrie soundtrack, conveniently found on our iPod. And she sat mesmerized, asking when Joseph or the brothers were singing, asking about the rainbow coat song, asking why Joseph sang about being scared, paying special attention to the cows in the dream song. Bud, who had really paid very little attention to Sis's Joseph interest, liked the music, with its pastiches of different styles. And so, we listened to it twice through on Wednesday, with sections the last few days.

It's not exactly how I came to love the musical, but it is a fun way to learn the Bible!