Our First Guest Contributor: Funny Girl Tamar Adler

We summoned her through our sorcery, and we will summon you too

Welcome back to Funny Girls! Thank you to all of you who followed this feed (this “stack”?) and the special few who cried from the hilltops about this new project. We are especially grateful to Queen Kim France, and to Substack’s very own Sophia Efthimiatou who sent us a celebratory email primarily composed of happy profanities and emojis. (We %*&^* you too, babe!)

Our debut piece was a fictional letter to a woman named Tamar. Which must be how we manifested our sophomore installment, a piece that the one and only Tamar Adler pulled out of her drawer and vouchsafed with us, an act so generous we consider it sacred.

Tamar is a genius Substacker, cookbook author, and food writer who sometimes says yes to magazine assignments that involve agreeing to plunge in ice cold water in the middle of winter or headlines like: “Can the Pantsless Trend Improve Your Tennis Game? One Vogue Writer Finds Out.” This is a woman who suffers for her art. And now she can add to her extensive bio that she was the first-ever guest contributor to Funny Girls. 

Enjoy!

Harper Moon Heads to Montessori

by Tamar Adler

Welcome to the 2024-2025 class of the Peregrine Falcons. We look forward to your child joining our classroom community. Below you will find your school supplies list and general community guidelines. Please refrain from asking any questions until the question and answer session following the Fall Harvest Festival in late October. 

Please send your child with one soft pencil case or a pencil roll, labeled with their name. (Ex: Harper Moon.) Please refrain from sending a hard case. Hard cases are subtly combative. The pencil case can be made of high quality waxed cotton or leather from a culled animal of a rotationally grazed ruminant herd. Please ensure the animal was sick or otherwise suffering.  

Please fill Harper Moon’s (again, just an example. We understand that your child may be named Levi or Phoebe :)) soft pencil case with colored pencils. High quality please! The pencils we prefer cost $15 per pencil. We know this sounds pricey, yet these pencils are what Maria Montessori herself used as a child in Italia. We have no way of knowing whether it is the pedagogical philosophy or the pencils that account for Maria Montessori’s success in democratizing learning for all children. Therefore, we cover our figurative bases with fancy pencils. 

In public school, where your child would be tortured by mandates like “sit in your chair,” and “sing the alphabet,” students use yellow pencils. We therefore ask you to kindly burn all the yellow pencils in your house in a sacrificial fire. Please allow your Montessori child to build and light their own Number 2 pencil fire. These kiddos can do much more than we give them credit for. Please have them light their fires using $20 bills. In public school, teachers don’t let children light fires. Let’s be honest: public school kids aren’t allowed to do anything–unless you count watching violent cartoons and playing shooting games. 

In public schools, money is employed for the exchange of goods and services. This IS NOT how the indigenous people exchanged goods and services. They lived in a gift economy, where items accrued value as they moved through a community. Decisions were made by consensus. Most daily needs were met by cooperation and agreed upon division of labor. Point is: we want to show our kiddos that conventional U.S. currency is no more valuable than the paper it’s printed on. Therefore, please let your kiddos start all this winter’s cooking and warming fires with cash. $20 bills are appreciated, but $10s will do! (We know some of you are new to this!!; We want to be accommodating!) 

Your kiddo will need high quality European outdoor gear (including a mountaineering ax and wooden skis, plus hand-hewn, child-sized farming tools for planting, cultivating, and harvesting), a high quality three-part water bottle with no straw, no top, and no bottom, labeled in natural dye made from the Eastern elderberry. Please ensure this bottle is made out of titanium! Please, please ensure that the titanium was sustainably mined. We are learning about the devastations of mining on local economies this year, and we don’t want to confuse our kiddos by participating in exploitative practices!!!! 

Please send three dark scarlet wide-ruled notebooks for Cultural Work, Geography, and Current Events. We know it is hard to find “dark scarlet,” but some smaller Dutch companies do use the tint, and we find it’s a more appropriate color to cover some of the darker parts of our history.  Our land, which was stolen from the indigenous people in the 1500s, was stained dark scarlet by the blood of its original inhabitants. 

Your child may wear an Elsa or Ninjago shirt to school–but only on their birthday. We ask that you refrain from sending them in any shirt with any character other than Barack Obama, Kamala Harris, Maya Angelou, Che Guevara, or Martin Luther King for the remainder of the year. Please refrain from saying “Elsa” at home. Please refrain from saying “Let it go.” If you need your Montessori kiddo to release something on which they have a tight grip, please smile and gesture with your right hand. This is body language we use in the classroom. If your child displays any aggressive or combative tendency, or says “Ninja” or “hayah” or adopts a fighting position, we will first check the kiddo’s pencil case to make sure it isn’t hard–this may be the source of the behavior–and then we will assume that the child has been watching violent cartoons and playing shooting games at home. 

We will send you daily incitements to quell your child’s–and your own–violent tendencies.  We know what a short step it is from picking a leaf off a branch to rapaciously exploiting labor and resources on Wall Street. So we plan to nip this behavior in the bud. (No pun intended! We would never hurt a bud!) We understand Montessori school is expensive. We know that asking you to buy supplies that exactly match every other Montessori child’s supplies can be stressful in these early back-to-school weeks. We understand it requires a lot of exactly the American dollars we are teaching your kiddos not to value! The world is full of complexities and contradictions. We cannot ignore that some of them may even exist inside our community. If you do not already have a lot of money, you are probably not reading this. If you do have a lot, great! See links to all of the above in the attached 365 page handbook–so paginated to honor the fullness of a year.

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Liked this? Then buy Rachel and Lauren’s hilarious and bone-deep novel The Memo!