Nate the Great

Em's school play this year was Nate the Great. They did something new: had a dress rehearsal Thursday night that they encouraged parents to come to with the cameras, video recorders and tripods. Set up your stuff to film it, if you need to move around to get your shot, just try not to block someone else's view.



I'm all about that. I ended up actually sitting front row center, where I got pretty much any shot my camera is going to get.



Thing is, I'd have expected the crowd to be more obtrusive than usual given the lower expectations set by the camera-friendly dress rehearsal.



It was the most courteous, attentive and respectful crowd I've ever sat in for a school event the entire time my kids have been in school.



Not hard to feature why: parents who show up when it's not even officially showtime are probably, on the whole, more focused on the kid they have on stage. Also, the auditorium was only about half full.



And the people who bring one year olds and whatnot because they can't find a sitter would simply beg off coming on a night like this, right?





Actually the Friday night crowd was smaller than usual (probably because some only attended one or the other and they'd been on Thursday). And it was a pretty quiet crowd, too. Maybe it's because they charged admission ($3, not much, but still not 'free.')



I don't think there are parents who are such philistines, necessarily, that they'd skip their kid's play over $3, it's more that people have trouble placing any value on something that's perceived as 'free.'





Whatever the reason, through both performances I really enjoyed being able to focus on the show. Friday with Mo was a little bit of an adventure, but she did a really good job for the most part of sitting quietly.



She wanted to verbally stim, but she managed to turn making the shush face (index finger over the lips dead center) into a tic that seemed to scratch the itch. It was weird, and a little distracting for me sitting beside her, but whatever works. I didn't have to bail out on the performance to keep her from ruining everyone else's experience.





The play was good. It's not as funny and well written a script as what they had to work with last year, Sleeping Beauty and the Beast. It's a similar style of play, drawing on genre stereotypes and featuring a massive cast so as many kids as possible can get involved.





Or maybe it didn't seem like it was quite as well written because 7th and 8th graders are not really steeped in the noir detective genre the way they are in fairy tales, so some of the jokes don't translate quite the same way.





I'm totally not faulting the kids performance, mind you. They did a great job and really had fun with it. I think maybe if they taught Raymond Chandler, John D. Macdonald and Dashiell Hammett to these kids (as they really should), it might have clicked a little more.





I was struck, too, speaking of 7th and 8th graders that all these kids are 7th and 8th graders. About a fourth of them look like they're still in grade school and about a fourth of them look like high school students. Maybe half in between, but when a kid who could pass for 10 is next to a kid who could pass for 17 and they're in the same grade... I'm sure it was true when I was in 7th and 8th grade, I think I just forgot.