Jeremy Olshan and Jennifer Fermino, New York Post
9/7/2010
Snagging a ticket to a Wednesday night matinee story time at the NYPL is becoming almost as competitive as scoring a ticket for a Miley Cyrus concert. Counterfeiting with these story time tickets has become such a problem that the library actually had to switch their system to color-coded tickets, making it almost impossible to make copies, as many people were making copies of their tickets for friends. The NYPL has started giving out story time tickets thirty minutes in advance to avoid mothers and their toddlers making a mad dash for the door. The library holds two sessions on Wednesday, one at 11:15am and the other at noon, each half- hour session holding about twenty toddlers at a time. Before this week, story time was scheduled at different times but the library had to cut down on their hours of operation as of this week because of budget cuts. Although the leader of the show, Raffensberger, says how she can “barely carry a tune,” she is able to entertain any and every toddler with her musical versions of children’s stories.
When I read this article I was absolutely amazed at how popular toddler story time had become at the NYPL. I would never have imagined that it would be at the level of popularity where mothers would be counterfeiting tickets and cutting people in line in order to attend. This article reminds me of when I was a toddler and how much I used to love listening to stories. I had always thought that the advancement in technology had replaced libraries in a way, as children these days would not get as excited as we did back then about story time in the library. This article showed me just how much story time has changed over the years, as it used to be much simpler, and now it contains musical versions of children’s books. I am happy to hear how excited toddlers still get about story time, as it shows that young children still enjoy the simplicity of reading a book.
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