Super Hero Kids

This is a short story from Brad Blaze’s book “TRAILBLAZER – Uncommon Adventures and business lessons from a travelling entertainer”.  Buy the electronic version (for IPAD, Kindle or as a PDF) from Smashwords – all proceeds go to Variety, the childrens charity.

SUPER HERO KIDS

Every year I try and help out with the Variety Club. They support disadvantaged kids and have an annual Christmas brunch. Usually they have a few thousand kids at the event and so I go along and draw the kids. They also have a range of activities for the kids, usually a headline singer and some other performers like clowns, stilt walkers and acrobats.

If you have ever been down in the dumps or contemplated how tough things are, a few hours with these kids can turn it all around for you. The kids are basically In heaven here, they get all the candy they can eat, show bags and entertainment and the smiles from ear to ear can melt your heart.

We usually have some big queue lines because with a few thousand kids, there are generally only two or three cartoonists that are willing to donate their time at essentially the craziest time of year.

A few years back I worked with my colleagues Steve Panozzo a fellow caricature artist, and David Rowe, who works for the financial review and who is arguably the best newspaper artist in the country.

It is a touching sight, as many of the kids have down syndrome, are in wheelchairs, some even operate them only with a deformed hand on a control or are pushed by their carer.

So we have a long line up of kids and Inbetween drawings, I look over at Steve, his face shows a warm smile as he draws a caricature of the young boy in a cape flying through the air. I look over at David, he is drawing a young girl as a ballerina twirling on her toes. It should be mentioned here that Both of the subjects that are being drawn and children in wheelchairs and will never have the opportunity to walk.

As the carer pushes the next child in the wheelchair in front of me, I decide then and there to draw every child as a super hero, because to live a life with these disadvantages, that is exactly what they are.

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