03/22/2006
Coventry fifth graders 'Ask Olga'
By: Jessica Selby

COVENTRY - First-time parents often struggle to find the words to get their points across to their growing children about puberty, peer pressure, choices and their appearance. Diane Postoian, the performer of the "Ask Olga" presentation that visited Oak Haven School last week, used age-appropriate comedy to get the job done.
Veiled behind the character Olga, Postoian came to the school last Wednesday afternoon dressed in a floral-print blazer with bright orange stretch pants. Red and gold ball-like earrings hung from her ears like ornaments from a Christmas tree. Her grey and black hair was pulled back from her face and she spoke to the fifth graders at Oak Haven with a broken English accent on "healthy habits and healthy choices."

"I am here to talk to all of you about the most popular thing that children worry about," Postoian-as-Olga said to the cluster of fifth graders gathered on the floor in the school gymnasium. "Hype, my dears, is information you get in what I like to call the pretend world that, if you listen to long enough, will make you think you have to be someone you are not."
Some of the topics that Olga touched upon were hair style, body shape and size, skin and general appearance. She explained to the students about the importance of inner strength and about advertisers' frequent use of subliminal messages. She incorporated cigarette ads into her presentation to highlight that message for the children.

The ad for Newport cigarettes that she used featured a group of healthy and fit-looking teens having fun on the beach in their swimsuits. This, Olga said, was a perfect example of the "misconception" presented by advertisers to cigarette buyers. What the advertisers really should do, she said, is get a picture of "a person stopping a car and sticking their mouth over the tail pipe."
"They are not going to show you a picture of a dried up set of black lungs," Olga said. "No, they are going to show you healthy fit teens."

Postoian's goal with the "Ask Olga" presentation, she said, is to present the facts to the students in a manner that allows them to make educated choices on their own.
"When I was growing up, my parents always told me the problems that I was having were just growing pains," Postoian said. "Today, I think a lot of what happens is that these natural growing pains are exploded and everything becomes an issue. Well, it does not always have to be such an issue."

Postoian speaks directly to the students using her Olga character, which she said she developed after leaving her job of 16 years as the executive director of Rhode Island's Looking Glass Theatre, a 44-year-old touring company for school audiences. As this position grew into a purely administrative role, Postoian's opportunity to perform vanished.

"I've been a story teller and a performer my whole life and, after 16 years at Looking Glass, I just felt it was time for me to get back on the road," Postoian said.

For the past eight years, Postoian has toured all over the Northeast, visiting schools and community groups, to speak to children on the "ickiest" of topics. The Coventry Substance Abuse Task Force and Mary Johnston, the school nurse at Blackrock School, organized the "Ask Olga" performance at Oak Haven last week. They had Postoian slated to perform for all the Coventry fifth grade students beginning in March.