A Wart Snake in a Fig Tree

Years ago, and we’re talking eons here, I played the part of Hansel in a third-grade rendition of a play based on the children’s story “Hansel and Gretel.”

They were a brother and sister abandoned in the woods by their father because the business of wood-chopping had fallen on hard times and papa was out of work.

Those were the days before welfare assistance, and dumping your children in the forest to save food was a common practice.

The kids were picked up by a wicked witch who wanted to turn them into gingerbread cookies and eat them.

Instead, the tads shoved the witch into an oven and danced and clapped while the old biddy baked.

I loved that story and to this very day feel a flash of warmth whenever I eat a gingerbread cookie.

However, though I may not be a perfect example of a wholesome human being, my participation in the play left me with no desire to kill old ladies.

Which brings me to today’s loathsome subject: Are grade-schoolers sophisticated enough to understand the humor in a story about a giant who eats his children or a woman who has sex with a ghost and bears a skeleton baby?

Seems funny to me, but I’m not a first grader.

For those unfamiliar with the ruckus, the Hacienda La Puente School District has been in an uproar over a series of books offered to students from grades one through six.

The series, called “Impressions,” features some classic stories, including one about a girl and her horse, but also contains some . . . well . . . darker stuff.

The giant who ate his kids and the woman who bore a ghost’s baby are but two of the starkly illustrated tales that have parents foaming at the mouth in a tranquil corner of L.A.

There is also a monster who rips off heads while a young crowd shouts “More!” and underwater pigs that reside in haunted lakes and live on “rotting things, drowned pets, plastic and assorted excreta.”

Nothing is sacred in “Impressions.” The traditional “Twelve Days of Christmas” becomes “A Wart Snake in a Fig Tree” with six shadows lurking, 10 ground hogs grinning, 11 lizards boiling and so on, ad gustum.

A graphic illustration of those eleven lizards boiling brings new meaning to a season of love and merriment.

“It’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen,” a mother of four said to me. “Kids in the first grade are being asked to decide how they want to die! Squeezed to death by a snake, swallowed by a fish, eaten by a crocodile or sat on by a rhino!”

The mother, Barbara Karr, who helped initiate parental protest against the books, was called a Nazi and told she didn’t understand the humor in the stories.

“They’re right,” she said, snorting fire. “I see nothing funny in a giant who eats his babies!”

The books have been temporarily withdrawn while school board members, in typical school board fashion, blink, scratch and try to figure out what’s going on.

Meanwhile, cries of “Communist!” and “Satanist!” howl like autumn winds across the district, censorship rears its head from the lake of underwater pigs, and the folks at the ACLU are drooling with the anticipation of dogs in a slaughter house.

You’ve got to question the wisdom, if not the sanity, of those who offer these kinds of books to first-graders. But you’ve also got to question the logic of mamas who see irreversible brain damage from reading stories about monsters ripping off heads.

Cruelty has been a recurrent theme in our most beloved fairy tales. Snow White’s father was ordered to cut his daughter’s heart out, for instance, to assure the queen that she, and not Snow White, was fairest in the land.

The story, which became a movie, not only failed to cause an outbreak of heart-ripping, but happily anticipated the almost-sacred Miss America competition, where often crueler emotions prevail.

As foolish as it all seems, I’m glad that parents in the San Gabriel Valley are protesting cruelty and not eroticism. It’s a pleasant change.

A few years ago, mamas in Culver City were enraged because their teen-age daughters were reading textbooks about sex. The theory went that if they read about it, sooner or later they’d want to try it. And sooner or later, I’m sure, they did.

I’m equally certain that the kids in the San Gabriel Valley aren’t going to be permanently damaged by anything in “Impressions,” as unprepared as they might have been for its ghoulish representations.

They may not be amused by it, but they might learn a lesson. Ghouls and books won’t hurt them. The thing they’ve got to worry about is the monster in the shadows called reality.