So I took the sprouts to see Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, and it was terrific: charming, funny and particularly refreshing to the eyes after a decade or so of watching the same three short films — A Close Shave, The Wrong Trousers and A Grand Day Out — over and over.

Except for a charmless short cartoon featuring the penguins from Madagascar, stuck in to promote the DVD release, no doubt — I had a good time and so did Dances With Mermaids, who is old and attentive enough to stay with an animated film that moves at an amble rather than an amphetamine-hopped frenzy. (The Divine Miss T, on the other hand, would only sit still for so much before heading outside to run up and down the corridor of the Megillahplex, but I was able to ply her with enough popcorn and Raisinets to see most of the film.)

Though the film is a big hit around the world, it's merely doing okay in the U.S., and the reason is probably inseparable from the source of its charm — it's just so . . . frickin' . . . English. The story is drenched in the small-town, countryside Britishness of vicars pottering around in greenhouses and manicured estates where an incursion of voles is a major crisis. There's a luverly scene in which the town's many gardeners bid a tender goodnight to their roses, their melons and their rutabagas, all set to the gentle strains of the "Venus" portion of The Planets Suite, written by Gustav Holst, who despite the sound of his Christian name is a composer every bit as steeped in Britishness as Henry Purcell or Ralph Vaughan Williams.

And so, with all this Englishness going on around me, I did what I always do whenever I hear something from The Planets — I thought of suburban New Jersey, the seventh grade and Mr. Paterno. No, I don't know his first name. He was a part-timer — a music teacher. Up to that point, the job title "music teacher" invariably made me brace myself for somebody who would try to flog the class through a half hour or so of jolly folk songs from around the world. Mr. Paterno, on the other hand, came in pushing a huge record player from the school audio-visual department and played us music.

And what music! Mr. Paterno was eclectic in the best way. While teaching us about song structure and melody, he employed everything from Black Sabbath's "Iron Man" to "Love is Blue." We got samples of orchestral music, Bach keyboard pieces and Janis Joplin singing "Mercedes-Benz." He once devoted an entire session to leading us through Billie Holiday's rendition of "Strange Fruit," and I can still remember the little chill that rippled through the room as we realized just what was hanging from those seven trees.