| For Immediate Release Contact: | |
| Maureen Kravitz, Public Relations BirdCage Press (650) 424-1701 Maureen@BirdCagePress.com |
Wenda O'Reilly, Author BirdCage Press (650) 424-1702 Wenda@BirdCagePress.com |
Fed up with TV violence, sexual innuendo and commercials, one mother unplugged the television. She and her three children played games instead...and then developed a game of their own.
Just released, The Renaissance Art Game is now selling at the Louvre, New York's Metropolitan Museum, Washington's National Gallery, The Smithsonian and The Getty museums, and bookstores everywhere. Their message to other families: unplug the television! And find new ways to play together as a family, celebrating life and creativity. Here's their story.
Ten years ago, Wenda O'Reilly unplugged the television when her children were preschoolers. It was a moment of mixed emotions for the third-generation descendent of the KING TV and radio entertainment empire, but O'Reilly could no longer tolerate TV's decline in taste and values. What did she and her family do as an alternative? They played games and read, and made up their own games. One of them, The Renaissance Art Game, celebrates heroes of another age-giants of scientific and artistic creativity, with deeply held spiritual beliefs. O'Reilly thought, "Why not combine what the children already enjoyed-playing card games like 'Go Fish' and 'Concentration' with art and history?"
The children chose their favorite artists and works of art, while their mother hunted for stories that would bring the Renaissance to life for children and their parents. She wrote small segments and taped them around the house. The kids' job was to read and grade each story. Would the game have come to be if TV had been a part of their daily lives? No.
It's sad and ironic that they, of all families, unplugged the TV. O'Reilly's grandmother was a pioneer of American broadcasting. Dorothy Bullitt built King Broadcasting in the Pacific Northwest in the 1940's, starting with one little FM station located over a furniture store in Seattle, and expanding to a large group of television and radio stations and a cable television network. When Dorothy Bullitt started out, businessmen laughed at her as a foolish woman; they called radio a fad. Bullitt went on to be one of the founders of the National Association of Broadcasters Code Board. Remember that seal of approval TV stations used to show each day, indicating that their programming met high standards of decency? That is now long gone.
In 1990, 42 years after her grandmother first went on the air, Wenda O'Reilly pulled the plug to protect her children. Since then, the O'Reilly family has turned their attention to one of the most creative periods of all time. They have tried to imagine what it would be like to watch Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci exchange insults in the town square of Florence or compete with each other through painting and sculpting. The O'Reilly children have grown up not always able to recognize the faces on TV Guide but having a closer bond with one another, built on making up their own forms of entertainment.
Wenda O'Reilly holds a masters degree in Education from Harvard University and a Ph.D. from Stanford University. Her first job was with King Broadcasting in Seattle. She went on to become the youngest media buyer in New York, at age 19, working for Benton & Bowles Advertising Agency. She worked in advertising in Milan, Italy, for four years before leaving the business to teach skiing, sailing and yoga at Club Mediterranée.
After marrying and starting a family, she became executive director of The Birth Place, an out-of-hospital childbirth center in the San Francisco Bay Area, and held a position as scholar at Stanford University's Institute for Research on Women and Gender. She currently works with her husband, James O'Reilly, publisher of the award-winning Travelers' Tales series. They live with their three daughters in Palo Alto, California.