Saturday Snapshot -- On the Ocean

Join West Metro Mommy for this weekly meme of photos people have taken and share on their blogs.

Spending a few days on the oceanfront provides lots of photo opportunities.

Here's a sunrise as I ran along the beach one morning. 

The evening before we left, we went for a walk on the beach and I took some pictures of Grace.

I love that the seagull placed himself in the negative space of this picture to help balance it.

And here is Grace drinking in the beauty of the ocean while the sun sets behind us in the west.

Saturday Snapshot -- Starring in Emma

To participate in the Saturday Snapshot meme, post a photo that you (or a friend of family member) have taken. Then leave a direct link to your post on West Metro Mommy. Photos can be old or new, and be of any subject as long as they are clean and appropriate for all eyes to see. How much detail you give in the caption is entirely up to you. Please don't post random photos that you find online.
As a parent, I'm always amazed by my kids talents. This weekend, Grace is starring in a production of Emma that has been transformed into a musical. So in addition to her acting, she sings beautifully too. The photos of her and Mr. Knightley are so beautiful that I tried to convince her she should marry  him so we could use the pictures for their engagement. They also sing a lovely duet about being in love -- the perfect wedding song they could sing to each other. Alas, Grace believes Mr. Knightley's attractions may lie in another direction.

For last night's performance, I took a dozen coral-colored roses to give my star. I'll try to get some photos of her on stage tonight. 

Hope you all have a colorful weekend.

Saturday Snapshot -- Les Misérables

To participate in the Saturday Snapshot meme post a photo that you (or a friend or family member) have taken then leave a direct link to your post on West Metro Mommy. Photos can be old or new, and be of any subject as long as they are clean and appropriate for all eyes to see. How much detail you give in the caption is entirely up to you. Please don’t post random photos that you find online.
My daughter Grace has the acting bug. And I believe most musical actors are enthralled with Les Misérables. She tried out this spring, and although she didn't get a big role, she decided to continue with it, just thrilled to be part of the production. Her main role is as one of the barricade students whose boyfriend goes to fight, but she also gets to be a whore in the scene with Fantine and Woman #6 in a solo singing role.
At the end of the show, she was in tears from the sheer joy and emotion of the show. Here she is right afterwards, still wiping away tears.

The show went off with only a small hitch. In the whore scene, a banging off stage ended up with the women kind of standing around for a few minutes, still in character, but unsure what to do. 

It turns out the conductor fainted. He had been going through cancer treatment and a stand-in conductor continued the show.

It could have been a little uncomfortable for us, Grace's parents, to watch her portraying a whore, but Earl jumped right into the stream of things and leaned over to me to whisper, "Hey! Grace got a client!" as she walked off stage with one man only to return a few minutes later and be taken off stage by another. 

Grace was enchanted by the 10-year-old playing Gavrotte. He's a heckuva singer and actor and has quite the good cockney accent for an American. 

And here are Grace and her friend Carmen dressed as whores. No wonder they were getting all the business on stage.

I'm also joining in with Paris in July this month cohosted by  Thyme for Tea and Bookbath.

Tomorrow is the last day to sign up for the $10 Amazon giveaway here. Just leave a comment to be entered and follow my blog or like me on Facebook for extra chances to win. 

She's All That

For adults, our lives are fairly predictable. We go to work, do all the household chores, occasionally indulge in hobbies or vacations. Life is not like that for my daughter Grace.
Grace is 21 and in January she decided not to go back to her college in New York (10 hours away). Instead, she took some classes locally and applied to other colleges. She'll be going about 20 minutes away from home in August for a theater/broadcast journalism major.
But she's not sitting home waiting for August. She'll be appearing in two shows this summer. In Les Miserables, she's a prostitute in the first act and a barricade girl in the second act. She was so thrilled to come home and tell me she was a whore!
The other show is Emma by Jane Austen, the musical. And Grace is Emma.
I know!
Promotional photos for Emma came out the other night and I was wowed. What do you think?

Here she is striking a fierce pose with Mr. Knightley 

All innocence

Each time I choose one as my favorite, I look again and prefer another one. 

Slightly mischievous

What do you think?Which do you like best?
 I can't wait for the show.

Our Family Storykeeper

I'm kind of writing around the subject here, and I'm not sure why. My Uncle Wil, my father's brother, died last week unexpectedly. Wil was a follower of my blog, the only family member other than my daughter Grace. Here he is with his son Michael and grandson Logan.
Since I can't seem to write about Wil, I thought I would divert to write about Grace and how proud I am of the way she mingled at the funeral and luncheon.
She was... well, there's no other way to put it. She was like me.
At first, I'd find her behind me as I went to hug aunts or uncles or cousins. Then she branched out on her own, holding long, involved conversations with people she hadn't met before that day. Here's a picture of Grace with her cousin Caroline, someone she has spent plenty of time with.
When we got to the luncheon, Earl and the boys sat down at a table to wait for the rest of the crowd. I started talking to cousins I hadn't seen for awhile and there was Grace beside me, answering queries about college and asking pertinent questions. I could see her brain making connections on the family tree.
Twice she has paid her own money for a month on ancestry.com so she can trace our heritage. In our family, she is the storykeeper.
Some time I'll have her explain how our family is related to Eleanor of Aquitaine and Earl's family is traced to Henry the Eighth.
On Saturday though, she focused on the family we have now. I didn't think about it at the time, but after a long drive home Saturday night, I was up early Sunday morning. It hit me then, how Grace, who we think of as reserved, dived right into the crowd. She was charming and sweet. The true her.
So at 8:45, I got up from my desk and crawled into Grace's bed to hug her. "Thanks," I told her.
In many ways, I wouldn't want Grace to be like me. But I'm glad that she inherited this social/family gene. Every generation needs a storykeeper.