Just say no to drugs--for some.

I took the kiddies to the library to work on their research abilities. Hey, if they don't practice those skills, then they get rusty. How many of you are confident about diagramming a sentence. Exactly. But, we're not going to anything too big. I just want them to remember how to document a source.

So, the assignment was to do research on famous dead Americans. I figured that they would pick Elliot Ness, Paul Revere or, dare I say, Walt Whitman. What I got was a bunch of OD'ed rock stars: Lane Staley, Kurt Cobain and whatnot. That wasn't exactly what I was hoping for, but I'm sure that I would have picked similar subjects when I was their age.

Hendrix, Joplin and Morrison, anyone?

I have to admit that our librarian wasn't too pleased about the situation as she was swamped with requests. It wasn't the work that was bothering her, though and she confronted me about it. She was of the opinion that today's youth need to seek out more positive role models. I agreed with her and suddenly she had me rethinking my standards. After all, we don't need these kids glorifying drugs on any level, to be perfectly honest. Then, she happened to open her mouth again. She said, "If they want to do rock and roll stars, then we have plenty of material on Elvis."

Elvis? Let me tell you sister, it wasn't the fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches that gave him that heart attack. And what about those volumes of books you have on Tennessee Williams, Poe and Kerouac? Maybe she is some kind of conspiracy theorist and believes that the US government is dead set on blackening literature. They're out to sully the names of anyone with writing merit!

Stumped, I decided to sit down and read the library's copy of People with the cover story, "Sex and the Single Mom."