After spending ELEVEN LOUD HOURS in the company of SIXTY 4th graders (and a handful of teachers and parent helpers) yesterday, today I’m feeling tightly wound and, I don’t know, cluttered-up inside. Does that make sense? Perhaps when you hear about my day yesterday, it might!
My eldest, J, has been participating in a national ’story dance’ competition so far this school year. This is a pretty big deal for J, who by nature of his disability, needs a little extra instruction and explanation - especially with things that don’t have a clear cut answer. He is gifted in math, working above his year level, and he is a moderate ‘off the top of his head’ calculator (though please don’t get that confused with autistic savantism, which is very rare - its just a quirk of his and its not, you know, multiplying 6 digit numbers or anything) but he ‘gets’ math because it is finite. There is (usually) only one right answer to a math problem. Similarly, his written language skills are wonderful and he spells better than I do - mostly because of the ‘only one right answer’ aspect.
But throw him in a totally abstract, free-movement ’story dance’ and I admit, I had misgivings at first. He’s not known for his slow and steady movement. He hand-flaps when he’s excited. But several months ago when he first expressed interest, I talked to his special ed teacher. She encouraged it (she’d had several students in years past have a go, with good results) and thus started several months worth of rehearsals, culminating in last night’s state heats.
Knowing that any extra pair of hands would come in useful for the day-long outing to the city, I volunteered as a parent helper. Most of the time, helping out at J’s school isn’t always possible - he travels to his school a few suburbs over by government-funded taxi each day, so we miss out on a lot of the ‘face time’ with the staff and helping out in the classroom type activities - things that his younger brother and sister get regularly due to the fact that we live just five minutes’ walk from their school. I miss that kind of interaction with J’s class. So we made a special effort this time around.
I was at the school at 10am to help corral the sixty hyper kids onto the bus. Forty-five minutes later we were in the city, and apart from a couple of minor hiccups (not being allowed into the theatre for another 20 minutes, getting caught in the rain) we eventually made it inside and were escorted to our dressing room.
The room was a shoebox.
We were a 70-plus crowd.
And we were sharing the space with another school group of the same size.
Can anyone say “sardine”?
Please don’t think I’m over-exaggerating either. There was not a scrap of bare carpet once all the kids had parked their tushes. If you wanted to move, you had to wait for someone else to stand up first. No. Room. What. So. Ever. Our dress rehearsal was at 12:30 and the other school didn’t arrive until 3:30, so we were able to spread out a little at first, but toward performance time later in the evening it was like trying to get changed in a child’s outdoor playhouse. With 59 other kids. In full costume. Cuh-razy.
We’d arrived at the theatre at 11:00, our dress rehearsal was at 12:30, and the performance wasn’t until 7:15. That’s a whole bucketload of hours to occupy 60 kids in the space my THREE kids would find confining after the first two hours. During the afternoon the teachers were able to break them up into groups and take them on walks around the city streets, during brief windows of time in which it did not BUCKET DOWN WITH RAIN. The original plan was to take the kids (in several batches!) to the nearby museum and art gallery. The torrential downpours at unpredictable times during the day put an end to that plan quick-smart. By dinner time, most of them were wet, cramped and annoyed. Good times!
And then there was the Great Pizza Debacle of ’08.
There was one particular staff member who was clearly frustrated at the lack of space and this was the woman who was in charge of the pizza. Forms had been sent home with the kids several weeks in advance, with boxes to tick for preferred pizza choices. This staff member extracted six or seven kids from the ‘mosh pit’, as well as myself, and we went downstairs (stairs…so….many…..stairs!) at the appointed time to pick up the pizzas in the foyer.
Well. TWENTY-FIVE pizzas and a non-English speaking delivery driver later, we again climbed the steps to the slobbering, ravenous children (who had, mind you, been snacking continuously on edibles brought from home - but, you know, this was PIZZA and it was FREE, so…) only to discover that every single one of those pizzas were pepperoni. At least half the kids had picked ‘ham and pineapple’ on their forms and for probably five of them, it was the ONLY type of pizza they ate. Remember, we’re all trying to manage elbow-to-elbow in an itty bitty space and we’d been there six hours already, so the kids could be forgiven for not being very flexible. Frustrated Staff Lady concurred and, after a huddle with the other staff members, decided there would be Major Repercussions for the pizza chain involved (I won’t say who, but it rhymes with Eats-A-Mutt…) End result? Firm phone call and 45 minutes later, we got our 9 ham and pineapple pizzas and we got them free, LOL (in case you were wondering, each school is allocated a budget for the production costs and the original pizza was covered in that, ie, pizza place didn’t donate them, but we demanded these new pizzas at no cost). I’ve never seen so many pizza boxes in one place in my whole entire life. That’s 272 slices folks. At my family’s usual rate, it would take us 17 monthly visits to snarfle that down - and that’s if we got pizza every single time we had takeout, and none of us can stomach that much grease.
The next drama centred on makeup. Again, the problem was compounded due to the close quarters but essentially, there were three people - two staff members and myself - doing the makeup for the whole 60 kids. Thank goodness it was simple! The Chinese miners were to have yellow on their faces, the Irish people pale makeup. But I don’t wear makeup. I didn’t know what end of the application sponge was which! Through trial and error (and I sincerely hope the first ten kids I plastered were in the back of the stage), I got into a groove. I spackled 32 kids. It was hilarious - the girls loved it, the boys hated it. Each kid’s had a friend sandwiched in somewhere nearby who giggled whenever the stage lipstick came out. The boys looked at me like I was about ready to stick them in a dress, LOL. I had one girl who grimaced so much I had her hold an icecream bucket in case she felt like rowfing. She was decidely green underneath all that Chinese Yellow.
All the way throughout the day, we had been warned continuously about the noise. The theatre where the event was held has the best/worst acoustics on the planet - great for performers, bad for roomfuls of fourth graders. The nature of the competition meant we were not only scored on our actual stage time, but on waiting time, following directions, staying quiet etc. We did badly, LOL. In the kids’ defence - did the organizers actually think it was possible to keep 120 kids to a whisper in a room smaller than the average basement? It defies logic.
But, we survived. And the performance was wonderful. Our ’story’ centred on fisticuffs between the Chinese and Irish miners, a mine collapse, and the two groups working together to ‘restore the earth’. J completely floored me. He not only followed the rehearsed movements just as well as any other kid - and at the right and deliberate speed at that - but he was right at the front of the stage for part of the performance - in front of a crowd of more than 200 - and didn’t do what I was fearing, which was to completely lose his place (physically or emotionally) and muck up the routine. He was brilliant!
That kid continues to amaze me.
We arrived home sometime around 10pm. I must have been exhausted because for the first time in - gosh, months - I went to bed on the ‘right’ side of midnight. Talented Hubby said he was only a few minutes behind me and I was already snoring away when he came in. Apparently, it takes a day in the company of 60 kids, two doses of paracetamol, 1 ½ slices of cold, discarded pepperoni pizza, a brief 2-hour sojourn on my own (the teacher graciously gave me some ’sanity time’ during the afternoon), a bag full of jelly snakes (which I kept in my pocket and snuck when nobody was looking - particularly hard to do in a room filled with kids trained from birth to sniff out sugar) and a combination of 32 white and yellow makeup jobs to get me to bed on time!
Mercifully, today was a teachers’ strike. All of the kids who did the peformance were already excused from school the next day due to the late night, but the strike was co-incidental and it meant I didn’t need to get up at Dawn O’Clock to get the younger two ready for school either. Ahhhh, it felt GOOD.
Somebody please direct me back to this blog post the next time I volunteer for a class trip, okay? LOL.
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