With her students out on summer break, now might be the only time to learn the whole story about Cary Kelly, the one-of-a-kind librarian with the multiple personalities.
A former professional ballet dancer, Kelly, 60, sees her job these days as a different kind of performance – one that inspires children to embrace the joy of reading and grasp life lessons not easily addressed in a traditional curriculum.
The Sacramento Country Day School librarian does it in ways that may be unlike any educator in the country – she goes into character, time after time after time. Voices, costumes, lingo, the whole bit.
She's somebody else so often that students may not know her as simply Mrs. Kelly, happily married to a man she met on a Sierra Club hike, mother of a 30-year-old son, a ballet dancer who took her first lessons as a 9-year-old in Fresno and a fitness buff who works out regularly and, at 5-foot-4 and 100 pounds, weighs the same as she did during her dancing days 40 years ago.
At school, it's a different Cary Kelly all the time.
For the annual book sale, she becomes Mrs. Teaselpaw, a member of the British aristocracy she describes as a cross between Miss Marple and Mrs. Doubtfire. On Read Across America Day she is the Cat in the Hat. At a pretend coffeehouse poetry event, she comes as a beatnik. At the Colonial market day for third-graders, she is Mrs. Thomas Farthing.
Each Friday during the school year, she dresses up as Nurse Kelly, complete with uniform and the vintage nurse's cap she bought on eBay. She goes around the school handing out overdue book slips with a Band-Aid stamp on them because "Ouch, you are hurting the library when you don't bring your books back."
A French chef, a scarecrow, a Miwok Indian named Dances Lightly. It never seems to stop.
Even for a recent interview with The Bee, she was found standing on a table in the library wearing funny glasses and holding a No. 2 pencil, rubber eraser and toy microphone.
With her dance and theater background, Kelly says it's only natural to go into character. She spends many hours poring over old clothes at Goodwill stores, maintains a special closet at home for her costumes and tries out new characters on her husband, retired Air Force officer Ralph Kelly, before unveiling them at the school.
Though she could stay put in the lower-school library amid its 11,000 books and perform traditional librarian duties, Kelly sees the characters as an important part of the lesson plan.
"When children are engaged, there's a lot more learning going on," she said. "When I'm in costume, I'm modeling effective performance and public speaking skills and creative thinking and risk-taking. It takes a lot of nerve to get up in some ridiculous costume and throw yourself into the character and not worry about what other people think."
It comes as no surprise that her favorite teacher in her youth was Mr. Sullivan, the sixth-grade teacher who taught her class to square dance.
Kelly's library caters to pre-kindergarten through fifth-grade students, though the Country Day campus includes students through 12th grade.
Asked how the older, too-cool-for-school students view her when she's in character, Kelly laughed and said, "Either they roll their eyes, or they totally pretend they did not see me."
Kelly didn't set out to be a school librarian. Trained in dance since childhood, she continued to excel throughout school and earned a master's in fine arts at the University of Utah. The niece of Barbara Crockett, who founded the Sacramento Ballet in 1954, Kelly went on to dance professionally for 10 years with Ballet West, the highly regarded ballet company based in Salt Lake City.
In Sacramento, her son Clay attended Country Day for nine years. It was during that time that Kelly fell in the love with the school and the idea of becoming a teacher. After going through a divorce in her late 30s, she enrolled at California State University, Sacramento, and earned her teaching and librarian credentials in 1985.
She started at Country Day as a teacher and then moved into the lower library. There, she has two goals, to help children learn to read and then to create what she calls real readers – "people who don't just know how to read but who choose to read."
Kelly realizes her unusual educational style may not have played well on a different stage. Country Day is an elite private school with 550 students and a talented faculty, including one middle school English coordinator with degrees from Princeton, Brown and Harvard universities. Tuition ranges from $14,600 to $17,300 a year.
Kelly is afforded more freedom than she would at public schools, which often have rigid lesson plans to meet mandated achievement standards.
Some parents, for example, might have wondered what a French chef or a British aristocrat had to doing with reading, writing and arithmetic, or why the librarian is always dressing up as a nurse.
"I had thought at one point about teaching in a public school because the money is traditionally better," Kelly said. "I just couldn't do it. I couldn't get up in the morning and go if I didn't know I was going to love coming to work.
"Being here has been such a blessing in my life."
Now that school is out for the summer, the Country Day students have scattered, and Kelly will spend part of the summer arranging her 11,000 books for a move to the new lower-school library. She'll make some trips to Goodwill, start planning for fall and dream up new ways – and new characters – to teach and inspire.
Throughout the summer, she is simply Mrs. Kelly, smart and funny and talented, as thin as a ballet dancer with the same perfect posture.
It's a character unknown to the students, perhaps, but hardly a disappointment.
Call The Bee's Blair Anthony Robertson, (916) 321-1099.
