I had never seen Into the Woods, the Steven Sondheim musical. So last night I was thrilled to see it with Grace performing as Cinderella.
The first act entangles a bunch of fairytales. In addition to Cinderella, there's Rapunzel and Jack and the Beanstalk and Little Red Riding Hood. They follow the Brother's Grimm version rather than the Disney-fied version, but at the end of the first act, everyone lives happily after. A neighbor of mine went to the show Friday night and left at intermission, thinking it was over.
After the intermission, the characters return, and they aren't quite content with their happily ever after.
The show made me laugh a lot and I thought Grace did beautifully.
I hope to record one of her songs this afternoon and include it in the post.
This morning, I feel slightly drugged from an overload of overscheduling and overemotion as I watched the end of my children's high school theater career.
I shouldn't be sad about the end. I should be thrilled that we got more high school theater time after Grace left. I never pictured Tucker throwing himself into theater productions.
He started off his sophomore year in the chorus of Oklahoma!
Combining theater with swim season is difficult.They practice three hours after school in the theater, then get to come home for about an hour before heading off to swim until 9.
But, Tucker's junior year, he accepted a role as the UPS guy in Legally Blonde. I thought that might give him the theater bug because he got so many accolades. He brought down the house every time he walked out in those UPS shorts and nodded toward the audience in his cool, nonchalant way. Of course, he also had to wear a blonde wig in that production since he was bald from swim season. They usually shave their heads at the end of the season. They announced the musical this year as Kiss Me Kate. Tucker didn't really have much interest in that. He'd never heard of it. He had to drop his vocal group class because it conflicted with his AP Stats class, so he wasn't singing regularly.
When auditions came around, he didn't go.
That's when the choir director started to pester him about trying out.
Tucker has never sung solo songs. Too self conscious? Too unsure of his voice?
He didn't think he wanted a big acting or singing part.
On the day of callbacks, that's when they bring in the students for specific parts, Tucker agreed to audition.
He sang "Hallelujah" and I like to think of him sitting on a stool with his hands strumming the chords of his guitar as his soft baritone voice sang the words.
Two days later, he told me he had the male lead -- Fred Graham.
The story of Kiss Me Kate is set in the late 1940s. Fred and Lily, an actress, are divorced and acting in the Shakespeare play The Taming of the Shrew. So it's a play within a play.
Tucker made it to States in swimming this year so his rehearsal time became sporadic. He caught the flu and missed a week of rehearsals.
He claimed he'd never be able to memorize all the lines, especially the Shakespeare lines.
And then the show opened and he amazed us.
By last night, his voice cracked a couple of times, worn out by the fourth show, but he pulled off his role with aplomb.
At one point, one of the boys in the show told the woman in charge of wardrobe. "Tucker was really mad at me." She explained to him that Tucker was only acting because he was supposed to be mad in the scene.
Maybe he could pull it off.
Tucker wouldn't stand still for pictures, except this one of him and his swim friends.
I'm back at the high school today to strike the set and put away costumes. My last hurrah with the high school theater.
As some of you know, two of my children are off in college, so my husband and I are home with just our 16 year old. He seems intent on adding extra activities so we are as busy as we were when all three kids were home.
Thursday morning I was debating whether I would go watch him sing with the Singers at school.
The concert for parents was that night at 7, but my husband and I both had to work, so we couldn't go. Luckily, Tucker had two other concerts Thursday -- one at the elementary school in the morning and one at the middle school in the afternoon.
I really wasn't going to go, but I started to feel guilty and decided some Christmas music might be fun.
So I walked down to the elemenatry school and listened to them sing. I loved watching the little kids react with delight when they recognized a song. And they were especially thrilled with "I'm Gettin' Nothin' For Christmas" as the high school kids pretended to slug each other and pull each other's hair. Last year, Tucker was in the Concert Choir. This year, he has moved up to the Singers, which requires an audition. They travel throughout the city doing concerts. Tonight they'll be at the zoo caroling.
I've tried to upload their song "I'll Be Home For Christmas/Let It Snow" which is appropriate for our family as Spencer comes home from Florida today, but we have to wait another week for Grace to come home from New York. The video refused to upload.
Hope everyone gets to enjoy some Christmas music this season.
On my way onto campus yesterday, a young mother and her 6-year-old daughter walked past me. The mother had a scarf tied around her hair and knotted in the front as if she covered curlers. She wore sweat pants over her taut body and a t-shirt. She walked quickly in her flipflops, and her little girl, in a one-piece shorts outfit and pony tails, hurried to catch up. The girl carried a bag on her shoulder that slipped down until she pulled it back up.
"Now you need to be quiet while you're sitting in the hall," the mother informed the daughter as they scurried past me. The girl silently nodded her head.
"That means no singing and no dancing," the woman said. "And no talking loud to Nonni on the telephone. Just draw and write quietly."
That made me think differently about this pair. The woman, a 20-something, inner city mother, returning to school. Her daughter home during the long summer days rather than at school. I wanted this little girl to be free to dance and sing. I pictured her, arms outflung, twirling through a grassy field, stopping only to make daisy chains. She only wanted to live, to not be stymied. In spite of the hardships she was born into, she had managed to find joy in life -- joy that made her sing and dance at random moments, like a happy little girl does, like an improbable high school musical.
Some people might have judged this mother for taking her daughter along to college and parking her in the hallway. I might have judged her one not-so-long-ago day, but more and more, I see the lives of desperation many young mothers live, trying to claw their way out of poverty.
This mother needs to attend college to get ahead. She can't afford to hire a babysitter, and she isn't allowed to bring the girl into class. So she'll leave her in the hallway with a cell phone and a caution to be quiet, to act against her natural little girl instinct.
This morning, before I left campus, I stopped by an office. The chair of the English Department is temporarily acting as a dean until the school hires someone else.
"I have a big idea," I told her.
She stopped what she was doing and turned to listen to me.
"We need day care for school-aged children during the summer." I told her the story about the little girl who wanted to sing and dance. "Students should be able to leave kids there free of charge during their scheduled classes."
"I'll write it down," she said, searching through stacks of paper until she found what she called her "dean" notebook. "I think it's a liability problem though."
Maybe it won't happen. Maybe students will continue to park their children at computers and on couches and in hallways while they sit in the backs of classrooms and worry about their children entertaining themselves.
But maybe, our school, heavy with students returning to college, will set up a place that on a sunny summer day, children can sing and dance while their parents study and try to move their family up a step in the economic echelon.
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