 I am mostly a children's book author and illustrator, and so I thought that I might read you my last children's book. And then I realized I didn't write my last children's book. I actually just illustrated it. So I brought the author here, my special guest star, Marcus Ewert. Please come up, Marcus. Who wrote our last book, Mummy Cat, and also is the amazing author of 10,000 Dresses, one of my favorite picture books in the world. So what I thought we would do is Marcus would read the book and I would show you the book, and I would also stop him and interrupt him all the time, which is what we do when we talk to children, and point out some stuff in the book. And then, if we have time, we're gonna have a little volunteer action. All right, so get ready. And here's mine, because I'm gonna wander, here's yours. Here's our PowerPoint presentation. Before you do that, I just wanna say one thing, my book, 10,000 Dresses, I wrote it to read at Radar about 10 years ago. Michelle asked me to be a guest and I wanted to read something, I wanted to read something new, so I wrote this, so this book was born in this room. Yay, Radar. Woo! All right, okay. Mummy Cat by Marcus Ewert. Illustrated by Lisa Brown. Winds hiss over desert sand. The moon shines down on empty land. And long ago. And I'm just gonna stop and say, I don't like picture books that rhyme, and this picture book rhymes. And it's really beautiful. Thanks. I'm gonna drive him crazy this whole time. Yeah, that's all right. And long ago, the pharaohs hid their treasures in this pyramid. Deep within this maze of stone, a creature wakes up all alone. For the first time in 100 years, he shakes off dust, he flicks his ears. From head to tail, dry strips of cloth, softly rustle like a moth. A cat who moves without a breath. A mummy cat who's passed through death. When we, well, we didn't meet, but Marcus posts on Facebook in a really lovely way all the time and he posted a little snippet of Mummy Cat. And I said, I love to draw cats. Hit, hit, hit, hit. And that's how this cat was born. Oh, I'm sorry. Don't look at that. Don't look at that. Don't look at that. Look at that. Look at that. And one cold night, each century, he gets up and he checks to see if she's come back, his loving friend, so that this lonely time can end. Nope. No? Sorry. There we go. For she was the girl queen, hatch upset, and he'd been her hero, not just her pet, the boldest cat ancient Egypt had seen, the number one cat, the cat of the queen. But now, he just feels old and small. He shuffles slowly down the hall. That's the picture I've most identified with. And all around are painted scenes of his past life with Egypt's queen. And now I'm gonna jump in and say, so beautiful, beautiful poem about mommy cat, Marcus wrote, and I said, but there has to be a murder in the book because it's for children. Well, she wanted to know why the cat died. Right. She never thought about that. And she's like, well, couldn't somebody kill somebody? I'm like, go for it. Yeah. So there's a story that unfolds in the pictures. When I teach my class on picture books, I say there are two texts in a picture book. There's the word text, and then there's the visual text. And so I got my hands on the visual text. And so there's some stuff going on there that I like to show the kids. And so what's the laser works? So there's our queen and there's someone else. And this is what I call angry marks. And this is how you say it, angry marks. So she's angry. And who is that woman in blue underneath the little stool she's sitting on? And all these artifacts are real ancient Egyptian stuff that Lisa drew, her drawings on. Stole. Stole. And that actually is the real hieroglyphics for the word sister. So a friend of my brother's is this professor at Yale of hieroglyphs, which was totally perfect because I was working on this book. And I was like, oh, we would love to check our hieroglyphs out with you because we didn't want to just make up hieroglyphs, Lisa and I are both Capricorns and we don't believe. We had to vet. Making shit up. So these are legitimate hieroglyphs. So if a second grader is reading it and they know hieroglyphs, they're not gonna be mad at us. All right, did I already read this page? Yes. Okay. More flashback murals. Mummy cat purrs to see the smile of the young girl playing by the Nile. Two boats floated, but one ship sank, clawed by the cat on the riverbank. And again, there's more hieroglyphics that tell you what's going on. I think this says happy and I think this says greedy or jealous or something. There's a glossary in the back, but why would we look at it and tell you the truth? For this mural of a noontime nap, dreams of mice on the queen's own lap. Their couch was set beside the pool. The shade from date trees kept them cool. So that says to sleep and that says to plan or to plot. And so when I was determined to kill everyone in the book, I was like, well, how will they die? So I put in this little scorpion and there's like, you know, she's after the scorpion. And I also put in this hippo who lives at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and his name is William. And I don't know why his name is William, but it is. It's on the website. And kids, as you might imagine, go apeshit for the murder. They love the murder. And I let them vote. I say, do you think that it's inappropriate or appropriate for children? And they have show of hands if it's inappropriate or appropriate for children. They all think it's appropriate. Except the one child. Yeah, we did a reading over in Berkeley at the school. It was like their big author of that. And this one kid was asking me, we did Q and A afterwards and he was asking me something about why, you know, talk about the love of the inter-Egyptians had for cats, what were cats representing? And I was saying a bunch of things. And one thing I said was, well, you know, this was a culture that like grew a lot of grain and food and stuff and a lot of grain attracts mice. Cats hunted the mice. And this poor kid just totally lost his shit. He just totally had a breakdown. And he was, because apparently we didn't know this. We should have known. But he had this, this poor kid had this thing about, like pretty much daily, they said, he would have some breakdown about mice because he really loved mice. So it was like the worst possible thing I could have said. And he was so, I mean, he was. He had to be taken out of the room. Yeah, no, he was distraught. I hope none of you feel that way about mice tonight. Here's Hatch upset drawing with her palette of inks. And here he is posing a miniature Sphinx. Marvelous scenes of the way things were when mommy cat was alive with her. So that says to create. And that says, that's either angry or greedy or jealous. It's one of those. But there's the scorpion. These figures I stole sort of absolutely directly from an ancient Egyptian painting. And I loved them. And this guy I stole, he was a, well here he's a tutor, but he was a dwarf, like high Chamberlain. Because I learned that in ancient Egypt, dwarves were revered and placed in positions of great power. And as a short person, I really appreciated that. But the very next picture makes mommy cat wail. The queen struck down by a scorpion's tail. Mommy cat knows he's not to blame, but he couldn't save her all the same. The scorpion struck both her and him, the poison spread from limb to limb. To laugh, to cry out. And this is my very favorite two couplets in the book. I like this too. This is how you wanna teach kids about death. It's just really cold and brusque. And end to dances, games, and feasts. Two small bodies wrapped by priests. In our very first reading, we had 80 preschoolers in a museum and we asked them what a mummy was. If anyone knew what a mummy was and one kid raised their hand and said, it's someone who takes care of children. And then we had to introduce a room of children to death. And this one little boy, it was so cute. We were talking about mummification in cats. This one little boy raises his hand and I'm like, yeah. He's like, we have a dog, but we don't worship him yet. Yet. I'm like, that's fine, give it time. He's totally, I didn't worship mine till much later in life. It was so cute. He was telling me like he really wanted to like get this off his chest, like just be clear. I do have a dog, but we don't worship him yet. And then the museum provided little stuffed cats and gauze for the kids to practice their mummification skills. Awesome. The paintings stop. The cats alone with silence, dust, and dull gray stone. Mummy cat slumps a little more, but up ahead there is a door. Who's the queen now? That's right, it's her sister. And through that door, there is a room, the very center of the tomb. A chamber stuffed with lovely things, a crown, a throne, four golden rings, mirrors, dolls, and makeup kits. Nothing that matters, the slightest bit. Nothing that matters except for the queen. Her face on the coffin, smiling, serene. This cold golden coffin, is this all he gets? Where is the girl he can never forget? And he's saying, this is the hieroglyph for meow. No kidding. Meow, meow. M-I-U, will tonight be the night that she comes back? Will the coffin open, even a crack? And at this point in the school visit, they start screaming at us. Yes, yes, it's going, it's going. Will the coffin open, even a crack? He'll wait, he'll wait till his friend reappears. The queen of his heart, for 3,000 years. See, they're together again, it's a sweet ending. And I like the fact that we made the undead like really charming, and that in this book you want the, like usually when a hand is coming out of a coffin, that's horrifying. And in this, what I love with this is like, you're so happy that she's coming back, and you're like, oh yay, she's coming back. So that's the end of the book. Do we have two minutes for, two minutes? All right, then, do you think we should do the, maybe we should do the, no? Okay, I think that, I'll just tell you what usually happens at the end of the event, is that we dress the children up as mummified beings, like the queen and the cat, and then we have one of them wear an Anubis mask, and one of them wear an Osiris hat, as the priests wrapping up the dead bodies. And then we divide the whole assembly into groups of paid mourners, and we have the kids pretend to be really upset, and start screaming and crying. So it's like a dream come true, like a group of children mourning out loud their fellow classmates. So that's my presentation. Thank you very much. Thank you.