The Kid Who Just Wanted to be an Astronaut

Hi everyone!

This is Drew, owner of Milestone Therapy. I wanted to contribute to the blog here on the growing MST website and just toss out stuff I think you might find interesting. I rarely will be putting out stuff that’s directly therapy related, as my crew is doing a great job at it.

In my little corner of the site, I’m just going to throw out stories I think are cool. Your mileage might vary.

Away we go.

Growing up, I was hooked on a comic book put out by a TV show called “The Electric Company”. They did this in conjunction with Marvel Comics, and the comic was called “Spidey Super Stories”.  In short, it was an entry level comic for little ones to 1) follow the adventures of their favorite super-hero and 2) teach them how to read along the way.

On TV, the low budget Spider-Man snippets were bookended by none other than Morgan Freeman, who played Easy Reader on the show. One-part hippy. One-part philosopher. All-parts cool.

Now, as an adult, I had completely forgotten this fact until I met with a friend this past week who reminded me of Morgan’s humble beginnings. (This also probably explains my unabashed love of his character “Red” in The Shawshank Redemption, one of the finest films of all time, but I digress.) While the Electric Company’s TV version of Spidey Super Stories were kind of campy to a four-year-old, those told on paper were transcendent. With the limitations of a TV eliminated and only ink and paper involved, Easy Reader’s stamp of approval meant I could go anywhere Peter’s adventures would take him.

In those pages, I learned not just how to read, but that people came in all shapes, sizes, and colors.  And some – the coolest ones – came from outer space. I loved seeing Peter Parker figure things out in the science lab at his school. I loved seeing him put on his red and blue long johns and go fight the bad guys with his friends like Hawkeye and Captain Britain. But I went nuts whenever a story involved a planet that wasn’t Earth. Who would Peter make friends with in outer space to stop Thanos or Galactus? What tricks from his science experiments were going to help him outthink the bad guys in that great black void?

I had to get there somehow and find out. Peter couldn’t keep all the excitement and intrigue to himself. I was four years old. I could read anything that had the “Easy Reader” stamp on it all by myself. I was a big boy after all. And there was no question that I was going to outer-space.

Stay tuned, true-believer…lots more to come!