HOW DID THIS STORY COME TO BE ?

Good question!

For a good part of my life I had enjoyed making dolls and miniature exhibits.
As a children's librarian at the Kinneret Day School , in New York City, I made many exhibits
for display.

One day I decided to make a display for our CLASSICS section. I thought about ALICE IN WONDERLAND, by Lewis Carroll. I thought of combining a section from THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS, ( the garden of talking flowers), and some of the characters from the original story.

I came up with this scene:

Of course, there were some of the usual characters:

The obsessive-compulsive White Rabbit

The Excentric Mad Hatter

and the equally eccentric March Hare

the flowers, each with his or her own personality

and of course,

ALICE

I even added a few characters of my own such as...

Baltimmorre Clone, a book worm with
very sophisticated tastes

and

Whatever theTurtle-- who will get there
whenever he gets there and no sooner,
"whatever" yawn!

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Well, my Alice's Garden exhibit was quite
delicate, and didn't make it to the library.

Besides, I became very attached to it,
and had the feeling that it would lead to
something.....

AND IT DID!

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THE QUEENDOM OF DZITZEL

I have always been an observer of personalities.

I am a compulsive person, who always wants
to get to appointments early.

There are those who react in an opposite way.

There are angry people, and gentle people, controlling people, and snobbish people; there are procrastinators, self-pitiers, and busybodies. There are people with a combination of all of the above, and other characteristics.

Personalities with tendencies are on what could be called a "personality spectrum." That means that the person is more or less that personality type.

I thought to myself: What if I create characters with exaggerations of individual personality traits that we see in people all the time?

And that is just what I did. All of these people live in a place called DZITZEL. It is not near where you live--at least I hope it's not. You'll find out why.

IT IS IMPORTANT TO UNDERSTAND, WHILE READING THE STORIES, THAT THE DESCRITPIONS REPRESENT EXAGGERATIONS OF PERSONALITIES. PERSONS OF EITHER GENDER CAN DISPLAY THESE CHARACTERISTICS. Males and Females of the species have equal opportunity to display any form of personality trait. Each story is preceded by an introduction which describes the character type AS I UNDERSTAND THOSE CHARACTERS TO BE. My discussions are not based on psychiatric theory: hence, no footnotes.

OKay- read on, and see how many of your neighbors "live in Dzitzel!"

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