For a school assignment to create commercials in April of 1973, twelve-year-old Daniel made a Sassy Fras mask (after his cat), and advertised “Sassy Fras Cereal,” performing in an imagined Sassy Fras voice. He practiced on Mabel before performing it at school and she was very impressed with his performance, talent, and charisma. Daniel’s teacher was too—so much so that she had him perform it for his principal. The principal was also impressed and had Daniel perform it for the other sixth grade classes. Ten years later, when reading the letter in which this account appeared, Daniel remarked, “What gets me in these letters, when I was just so young, was just how nice my mother speaks of me. It’s amazing, Dave, it really is. Can you imagine how amazing it is for me, to have my mother saying these nice things about me, even though it was ten years ago?”1
Indeed, Mabel’s estimation of her son had changed so dramatically in the intervening years, that no one that met him after high school could imagine that mother and son once got along at all.2