Supporting the Arts

I’ve become the fall back parent when the certain activities call for parental support. For whatever reason, they could not find a parent to help out with the kid’s Christmas concert on opening night. The mother who was going to do it asked if she could be excused so that she could actually watch her daughter perform for one night, which is completely understandable, but then the only parent they could come up with is me? Talk about scraping the bottom of the barrel.

Not only was I asked at the last minute, but I am sick as a dog. I can’t stop coughing, and wondered what exactly I’d gotten myself into, because of course I couldn’t say no. How can you not help when your kids are involved?

Either way, I didn’t have a lot of time to learn the drill. Granted, it’s not rocket science, but it’s a little stressful when you have to get it right for the kids in front of a live audience, who also happen to be your friends and neighbors. The job of the two parents was to take the props between songs and then make sure the kids had the right props for the next song. No big deal, right?

Except that there is about 2 square feet to work with, and for whatever reason, I ended up with a majority of the pieces, which I had to clear out of there immediately because the adult choir was waiting to take the stage. This entailed carrying a laundry basket filled with drums and a 3 foot doll through a narrow stairwell about 2 feet wide.

To add to the fun, because I was sick, I’d brought along my backstage survival bag, which included water, a towel to cough into, and enough cough drops to feed China. The reason for this is because during dress rehearsal, I was coughing my lungs out, and even though A didn’t say anything, I would have been mortified if my dad was backstage making all that noise.

All in all, it went fine. I was tempted to take all sorts of serious cough medication, but worried that if I was drugged up, I would have made a major blunder, so instead I took something milder, ate about 50 cough drops, and came out in one piece. It wasn’t easy.

Boy, the things we do for our kids. Until the next time, thanks for reading.