the flat s tour

A few weeks ago Karen, one of our testers who has also become a friend, contacted me to see if we would be willing to host a Flat Stanley-based version of her daughter, Bethany, for a school project.

Everyone in Bethany’s class made a flat version of themselves and sent it to a family in another part of the country. The host families were asked to take their visitor around to show them the sites in their area. Pictures were taken and sent back to the class so the kids could learn about how people live in different parts of the country. How fun!

As it happened, I had just cut up an old trade show banner with a life-sized version of our S paper doll on it and wanted to do something similar with our Flat S. So we swapped flat children, and the Flat S Tour was born!

 

 

Flat S has just started s making her way around the world, and the exciting part is that we don’t know where she’s going to go! We sent her to Karen to kick off the tour, but after that where she goes next is up to her host family.

Flat S will be visiting friends of Oliver + S all around the world (we hope!), and we’ll be sharing her adventures this year on the blog. If Flat S pays a visit to your home, we hope that you’ll write a little post for us and show us where she goes and what she does during her visit. As photos and tales of Flat S’s exploits arrive here in the studio, we’ll share them with you on the blog. We’re excited to see where Flat S visits and what she does, and we hope you’ll enjoy following her on her adventures too.

To give you a sense of what Flat S might do on her trip, here are some photos of what we’ve been doing with Flat Bethany. We wanted to give her a real New York experience, so we brought her along on a few of our recent adventures.

Flat Bethany rode the subway all over the city. Here she is waiting patiently for her train to arrive. (Flat Bethany is considerably smaller than her counterpart, and I took these photos with my ipad, so they’re not great quality.)

 

 

And here comes the train!

 

 

 

Every so often, S’s class hosts a publishing party so parents can read and comment on recent writing projects. Flat Bethany read persuasive essays when she visited S’s classroom.

 

 

 

(Don’t you love Flat Bethany’s cable-knit cardigan?)

 

 

On another day, Todd, S, and Flat Bethany headed uptown to run an errand on 34th Street, and then they went to the Guggenheim Museum to visit a friend who works there and wanted to show them a new exhibition. Here is Flat Bethany on 34th Street with  the Empire State Building in the background.

 

 

And they managed to sneak a couple of photos at the Guggenheim, because Flat Bethany really wanted to see a Picasso while she was in New York.

 

 

 

Last Saturday we kept Flat Bethany especially busy. We started on the upper east side, where we did a little window shopping on our way to the Whitney Museum.

 

 

The girls weren’t terribly impressed by the wedding dress in the window of Vera Wang or by the Louboutin shoes next door, so we moved directly to the business at hand: family day at the Whitney! First, the girls walked the red carpet and posed for the papparazzi.

 

 

They posed with a Calder sculpture and made pop-art-themed drawings based on a photo of Lady Gaga.

 

 

 

By then it was lunch time, and we needed to get across town for our next event, so we took S’s pink scooter through Central Park. On our way we grabbed a hot dog, since the weather was absolutely gorgeous and everyone was out enjoying themselves. We even had musical accompaniment to our hot dogs.

 

 

 

 

The park isn’t quite ready for spring yet, but we weren’t disappointed because we already had plans!

 

 

 

We waved to the headquarters of ABC and grabbed a doughnut and apple cider snack from an outdoor market across the street from Lincoln Center. While we were hanging out, Flat Bethany met a friendly pigeon! (The locals here are very friendly, especially if you offer them a few doughnut crumbs.)

 

 

 

 

Then we headed to Lincoln Center to pick up our tickets to a Paul Taylor Dance Company performance. (S’s class has been taking dance classes with the Paul Taylor company this year, so she was pretty excited about this.) S and Flat Bethany threw coins into the fountain at Lincoln Center, and then it was time to go find our seats.

 

 

 

Flat Bethany posed in front of the stage before the performance.

 

 

And afterwards, we even got to go backstage to meet some of the dancers and to say hi to a friend who was working with the wardrobe department.

 

 

 

Flat Bethany is on her way back home now, accompanied by some souvenirs she collected during her visit. We hope she enjoyed her trip, and we’re excited to see where Flat S goes in her travels! Stay tuned; she’ll be checking in next week with a report on her visit to Real Bethany.