Toymaker urges inclusiveness for today’s kids

Laurel Wilder, founder and CEO of Wonder Crew, said it was hard to break into the toy industry with toys that bring more tenderness and thoughtfulness to boys’ play. “Any time I say ‘boy empowerment,’ I get a sense of uncomfort,” Wilder said during the “Inclusion: Does That Mean Me?” panel with Geena Davis. “Our kids need different things right now. They need to know it’s OK to cry and connect. We need to be more inclusive with both (boys and girls).”

■ When asked about the implications of the most recent Academy Awards being more diverse, Geena Davis said she was apprehensive to answer without any statistics or further proof of change. “When Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to win Oscar, it didn’t change anything, not even for her,” Davis said. “The movies that came out were already in production or already shot. The Oscars don’t control what gets made.”

■ Stuart Kronauge, senior vice president of customer marketing at The Coca-Cola Company, said being in a position of power made her more sympathetic to men. “When you’re primary breadwinner and climbing to where you want to be, you then have to stay there because you’ve enabled all this other infrastructure behind you,” she said. “It’s overwhelming. Men have felt this, but they’ve never really had the choice to do something different.”

■ Maysoon Zayid, a Muslim American comedian and actress who has cerebral palsy, said breaking into the entertainment industry was especially difficult. She did so through stand-up comedy. “I tried out for a part about a girl with cerebral palsy and didn’t get cast,” Zayid said. “People aren’t used to seeing disability as mainstream thing. People do fear us, they are disgusted by us. The only context we’re in are as charity cases. We’re hoping to mainstream disability so we’re not special guest character in the background who gets magically healed or the wacky best friend.”

■ The weather postponed Nely Galan’s book signing scheduled for Wednesday to Thursday at the Walmart Neighborhood Market. Galan is an independent producer and a former president of entertainment for Telemundo. Her book Self Made was published in May 2016.

■ Producers and cast of Nosh: Bite-Sized Adventures — a children’s adventure cooking show — held two cooking demonstrations at Brightwater: A Center for the Study of Food on Tuesday evening. The first episode will premiere with the episodic shorts at 2 p.m. in the Mockingbird Cinetransformer.

■ Grammy nominated singer-songwriter Jewel said the powerful thing about music is it bypasses the intellect and “goes straight into the heart without our permission” during the panel “Stroytelling Through Music.” “Often as creators of music we often don’t know how the music is going to impact the listener. We just try to create a song that hopefully has a lot of potency and a lot of emotionality that’s really authentic,” she said. “What the receiver does with that music is really incredible. We never know how it’s going to influence somebody. For me, that’s what I feel like the power of music is. It by-passes the intellect and it creates and emotional experience, and unless we connect emotionally in any of our products, we actually don’t have any connection and nobody remembers it. Nobody remembers perfect things or highly technical things, they remember emotional things.”

■ Jewel performed for a sold-out crowd on the Coca-Cola Soundstage in the Meteor Guitar Gallery on Monday night. She invited song requests and a few audience members were invited on stage. One was asked to create a fictional story of what inspired Jewel to write the song “Little Sister.” Another was asked to pull up lyrics for “I’m Sensitive” and display them on her phone while Jewel sang. The song was from Jewel’s first album and she claimed to have forgotten some of the lyrics. Jewel concluded with her trademark encore of “Chime Bells” in which she yodels.

■ For more information on the Bentonville Film Festival, download the BFF app, follow them at @BFFfestival or visit bentonvillefilmfestival.com.