Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes
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Ed Yeates ReportingActors and stand up comics from New York were at a Utah school today, poking fun at traditional American lifestyles that are insidiously fattening up kids for major diseases or thinning them down so much, their bodies are falling apart.
"Isn't it true, Barbie, that less than two percent of American women are actually biologically capable of having a shape anywhere near yours?"
Putting Barbie on trial, pulling fat from a McDonald's sack, attacking soda drinks, sugared down cereal and more. In a new traveling theatrical production, actor Michael Climek and comedian Julie Perkins from New York are driving home serious messages to a target audience, in a funny way!
Barbara Storper, Founder/Creator Foodplay Productions: "Using theatre to get the whole school involved is a wonderful way to counteract media messages."
They're trying to counteract media messages promoting super-sizing, super strength or super thinness that's creating a generation sure to inherit the byproducts of distorted lifestyles.
While laughing, the kids get the messages, sobering ones, like the epidemic of teenage obesity. One out of three kids will now get diabetes because it. And heart disease is sure to follow.
Barbara Storper: "Whenyou see and ad promoting that, they have to think twice and say, 'Why are they pushing this stuff that's no good for me onto me?'"
For teens like Rush, Jessie, William, Aubree, and Halie, is the message getting through?
"They made us laugh a lot. I liked it a lot. It got through to me"
"You need to realize that the stuff you do now affects fifty years from now."
"I think it was pretty cool."
"I think it was one of the best assemblies we've had."
"It's going to be hard, but I hope we can do it."
The goal here is to reach a day or a time when eating healthy is the trendy thing to do. It becomes the thing the peer group accepts widely. And with teens crowding around the actors, the evolution may already be underway.
The Centers for Disease Control funded Barbara Storper's production. Intermountain Health Care is hosting and paying for the show's tour to 40 Utah schools.
