Rabbit-Rouser : Authority on Beatrix Potter Believes This Paper Bunny Is Priceless

“Don’t you think that you should concentrate on Beatrix Potter?” Delores Bowles is asking me, with a shadow of a scold. “You know you should really wait for the centennial in September,” she says a bit later on.

Delores is an authority on Beatrix Potter, the English author, artist and conservationist, and she is telling me this because she believes that the 100th anniversary of the world’s most popular children’s book, “The Tale of Peter Rabbit” is Important, in a news and historical sense, and because Delores cannot help herself.

You see, Delores is a teacher, in a very defining sense. She taught in the classroom for 43 years.

(And these were all sorts of classrooms, filled with full-grown smarty-pants and teeny-weeny ones, from Nepal to Ethiopia to Long Beach to Newport Beach to places you have never even heard of in Missouri. Delores is from Missouri.)

In other words, I am sure that this woman with the huge eyeglasses and funky, dangling rabbit earrings (who is resting against some Peter Rabbit pillows, underneath some framed Peter Rabbit posters, sipping raspberry tea from you-know-what kind of china) carries the teaching gene.

And plus, she is prone to toss off phrases like “topsy hobbly,” so one must always pay close attention to her words.

But I say “not now!” to Delores and her Important Subject, much like Peter Rabbit might have, Peter the mischief-maker, Peter who always thinks he knows best, Peter who likes to have a bit of fun.

So, now then, Mrs. Bowles, about those Superman sheets. . .

Well, you know how men are, Delores says. This was in the late ‘60s, she imagines, just about the time that her Beatrix Potter and Things Related collection started taking on a life of its own.

At present this includes 187 figurines of Peter Rabbit and Benjamin Bunny and Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle and Jemima Puddle-Duck and Mr. Jeremy Fisher and go read the rest of the 23 original Peter Rabbit books for an inventory of the other characters that Delores has on hand.

Naturally, there is lots more to Delores’ collection--books, puppets, cookie tins, doorstops, stuffed animals, a lace applique, stop me me before I get carried away--all of it helping to transform her tiny Newport Beach home into a Beatrix Potter museum of sorts.

But, yes, yes, about men. It turns out that Delores was married to a wonderful one, M.A. (his mother named him Mernice), for 54 years. And back then, M.A. was feeling a bit overrun by rabbits.

Delores could appreciate this, but then again, there were these Peter Rabbit sheets that she just had to have. So she bought them, of course, but seeing as how she and M.A. slept in twin beds pushed together, she bought him some Superman sheets at the same time.

Then that night Delores sat out in the living room as her husband turned in early. She waited, trying to act natural. Well, suffice to say that M.A. got the message. He actually gave off a big hoot. And he never said a word about the rabbits after that.

Now back to the Important Subject.

Did you know that Beatrix Potter, who had an incredibly miserable and isolated childhood as the firstborn of very wealthy and oafish parents, wrote “The Tale of Peter Rabbit” as a letter, dated Sept. 9, 1893, to the gravely ill child of her friend and tutor, Annie Carter Moore?

This little boy was the first child Beatrix had ever held, but she didn’t know quite what to say to him, so she made up this tale. And, his mother reported, he wanted to hear the letter again and again.

And did you know that the locales in Potter’s watercolors actually still exist at her home and others in England’s Lake District?

Fact is, Delores has visited them, including the gate to the vegetable garden that Peter Rabbit went under at Potter’s maternal grandparents’ home, which currently belongs to Barbara Cartland, the queen of the romance novel.

(Which is a whole other story that Delores will tell you, complete with photographs of herself with Barbara and her fat dogs, not to mention the author’s Rolls-Royce and the chauffeur who graciously drove Delores and another member of the Beatrix Potter Society back to London.)

Anyway, there really is much more Important Information to convey, but Delores keeps pulling me back with her wonderful storytelling ability, which, incidentally, people pay for.

Delores figured that after she retired from teaching, the requests for her storytelling (she can relate most of the Peter Rabbit stories by memory) would slack off when she started charging for them.

But no. This is a very busy woman. She has a three-year calendar and storytelling bookings (for children and adults) already into 1994. By then she’ll be 80 years old.

First, however, she has agreed to a request by the Royal Doulton china company to tour around the country (first stop Chicago this week , and Southern California right before Easter) to help introduce a new line of Beatrix Potter figurines and china.

Delores will tell stories, accompanied by her own Peter Rabbit props, while an English artist paints.

So what is it about the Peter Rabbit stories that has so captivated Delores over the years?

Delores would have to say their simplicity, and the fact that children are just fascinated by them. And, of course, we all know that encouraging children’s fascination with reading is a glorious thing.

“The child that reads is a child that leads,” Delores says.

And did I mention, also, that they are delicious fun? Doubtless Peter Rabbit would understand.