At Addison Elementary, students learn when foods sing

Tucked inside Palo Alto’s Addison Elementary School, there’s the whimsical world of Laura Wright’s second-grade class, where each year in the fall, her kids set aside their roles as students and choose whatever they want to be: a firefighting onion, a cheerleading tomato, or simply “Happy Cheese.”

All of these characters, individually chosen by the students, are for a 17-year-old tradition Wright introduced to her curriculum when she started teaching at Addison, called “No Turkey for Perky.”

It’s a 20-minute, Thanksgiving-themed musical that arguably could be considered a surrealist, avant-garde piece of work. (What Broadway play takes the creative leap to allow bread dough to be a football player and a pineapple to presumably earn a doctorate and become a professor?)

“So much of school is academic … and I just think there has to be fun in school,” said Wright, who has taught for more than two decades.

The core of “No Turkey” is the same each year. The main character, Hazelbelle Hanks of the Hanks family, needs to decide what food she wants to eat instead of turkey, a dish she is “not thankful for” and feeds to the family dog, Perky, every year. And as she thinks about it under an anthropomorphic plant, various foods start to rhyme and dance around her with reasons why she should eat them.

The rest is left to the unrestrained imagination of the second graders. The structure of the Hanks family can be changed (sometimes there’s a grandpa or a baby), the foods can take on any type of job or personality and the lines and songs are tweaked accordingly.

Wolfie Helft, 8, who plays one of two New York Police Department pizza delivery guys in “No Turkey,” explained the correlation between a police officer and a pizza delivery guy, perfectly summing up most of the students’ whimsical sentiments and creative thought processes behind their characters.

“Nothing,” Helft said. “I like the line, ‘NYPD, open up.’ That’s the only reason.”

Besides brazenly challenging conventions of art, nature and societal roles, the true success of the play comes from the skills Wright is able to pass on to the students even if they might not immediately realize it.

“Even at 7 and 8 years old, they’re doing things that will be life skills,” Wright said. “Talking in front of someone, organization — I don’t think they really get that that’s already what they’re practicing, but they go on to be confident second, third, fourth and fifth graders.”

Previous students of Wright’s class, some of whom visited on Wednesday to see the performance, attest to the fond memories they gained and lessons they learned from performing “No Turkey.”

“I love Ms. Wright’s class and I love Ms. Wright,” said Ori Cohen, 13, who’s now an eighth grader at Gideon Hausner Jewish Day School. “She’s one of the best experiences I had in elementary school, (and) it was a really fun play because we all got to be together. At the same time we were messing around, we were also writing our own lines, coming up with our own characters and experiencing what it’s like to work on a project with other people.”

By having students engage in a collaborative process like orchestrating the play, Wright also believes they become engaged in the rest of the curriculum.

“The reading, writing and the math — all of that comes, but if they don’t feel connected and comfortable, they don’t raise their hands, they don’t participate,” Wright said.

Finishing up the 17th year of the tradition, Wright is determined to continue weaving the annual performance into the students’ lesson plan.

“It’s very fun,” Wright said. “Something I hope to keep doing forever, as long as I’m here.”