The A-Bomb

This was the awesome cake my mom made me for my birthday party a few weeks ago. It’s probably the greatest thing ever created. (It’s a dinosaur)

So yesterday was my first school booking for a day long workshop at the Empress. We had a class of 19 grade 5 kids come to the theater so we could teach them how to act crazy and create stories. I had a little bit of experience teaching children during my Theater for Young Audiences class, but I was still a little nervous. Kids are hard to predict, and sometimes there are perfectly happy and well behaved little angels and other times there are evil little miscreants who never listen and hate everything about you. So I went into it with a positive attitude, and while they weren’t nearly as bad as I thought there was still some little punks who we immediately recognized as ‘trouble makers.’ I’m just glad Jeremy was there to act as the ‘head honcho’ and wrangle the kids into shape when needed.

For the first part of the day we just did some drama games, and for the most part there wasn’t much worth noting. At one point however, Jeremy had to stop everyone and talk to them ’sternly’ because everyone was running into each other and there was a possibility of getting hurt. As he was giving a little talk to the kids, the teacher piped in and started talking about how ‘This is what I’ve been going through all year, I can’t believe this is still happening ahhhh’ and it was a little awkward. It seemed like the teacher was really stressed over her kids and was happy to get the year over with. When it came time for lunch she asked Jer to come with her and the kids to the park because she might not ‘be able to handle them’ alone. WHAT? You are their TEACHER lady. Maybe you chose the wrong profession?

After lunch was when we made a little mini play with the kids. We each had a third of the kids and made the beginning, middle, and end to a story (Hansel and Gretel) separately. So afterwards we all showed them in order and it was pretty interesting. But the worst part was trying to figure out how to cast the kids, I had three boys and three girls, all the boys wanted Hansel and two girls wanted Gretel (the third didn’t care and didn’t seem to want to do anything at all). So I had to make some executive decisions and choose everyone’s part. The one girl was happy with being a wolf, while the one boy was okay with being the evil witch. The third boy, however, HATED HATED HATED being a crow, and sat down on the edge of the stage and pouted. He said he didn’t want to do ANYTHING anymore, so I asked if he wanted to do Math homework instead, and he was like ‘YEAH’ which took me by surprise so I asked if he HAD any of it with him, and he said no. So I was able to make him happy with being a crow since he was allowed to run down the aisle flying up to the stage. Kids are strange.

The weirdest thing of the day, though, was after the kids left. Last week Gerard (Artistic Director of the Empress) invited all the summer staffers to watch the Rolling Stones concert dvd (Shine a Light) by Martin Scorcese and eat pizza. We had no idea why this was happening, but he made it sound like it was pretty much mandatory. So that was supposed to happen yesterday and we waited around. We were corralled into the theater’s balcony and he gave us all sheets of paper with ‘STAFF MEETING’ written on top which was strange enough because we weren’t told it was a meeting. Then he made a point to announce at the beginning that he wasn’t expecting the summer staff to be here…even though he INVITED US! Then we had the pizza (which was pretty bad actually) and they started the movie. It was ONLY the summer staff by about halfway through the film and I fell asleep watching it. Honestly there is only so much of Mick Jagger’s old wrinkly ass waving in front of my face that I can take. Wouldn’t it be embarrasing if he was your grandfather? I guess only slightly. And you’d be pretty rich, so…

The drummer was the coolest looking grandfather ever though. Anyway it was pretty strange that we were pretty much forced to sit through this movie when no one else was even watching it. Oh well, afterwards I got some fresh popcorn! (we get free pop and popcorn there)