A Walk Through Harlem: Introduction

Dan Trueman

The recipe seemed simple enough:

• Ingredients
  • three kids, ages 11-12
  • a bunch of computers

• Instructions
  • stir for 10 weeks
  • present musical performance at the 3rd World Summit for Media and Children in Greece, March 2001

Why, then, was I so terrified of entering the kitchen?

Well, it's fairly obvious. Both ingredients are notoriously tricky to cook with. Will the kids be smart, willing? Will the computers, uh, work? And is there anything that we can do with them that the kids won't scoff at? What kind of music can we possibly make? All of these uncertainties make the prospect of "stirring" unsettling. And nothing like a culminating week-long trip to Greece for a performance in front of several television cameras and hundreds of people from around the world to turn it in to a veritable pressure-cooker. Metaphor complete, almost.

And I wasn't alone in my fear -- before the project got started, the catchphrase among the project leaders was, simply, "we're doomed."