The Long Run

"I got this feelin' inside my bones
It goes electric, wavy when I turn it on..."

–Justin Timberlake, Can't Stop the Feeling!

The first show I missed due to work travel; I heard it was one big, fun and hot mess. A bunch of grade-school kids who practiced for weeks to perform a version of the movie Trolls, memorizing spoken lines, scene after scene, and lots of singing practice as well.

These productions are extracurricular for the kids at our school and we have to pay for each child to participate, although each child gets a part no matter what. Even multiple parts to ensure the production is fully casted. The program and production director is really good with the kids, with the patience of a saint.

And for weeks our girls practiced their roles at home, so excited to be in the Trolls production. Beatrice played Branch's grandma and a Bergen, and Bryce was a Smidge, a spider and part of the pet crocodile (of course, if you know the story and the characters).

Then came the final show, the one I could attend with the Mama (what I lovingly call my wife), along with my sister and my grown niece who's pregnant with her first child. We all couldn't wait to see it!

It was so adorable! So much stage fright, undecipherable mumbling, subdued singing, director-fed lines, punctuated by moments of immaculate comedic timing. And throughout, nothing but proud smiles and laughter coming from the audience of parents, family and friends.

These were our children bold enough to be in the play/musical in the first place, to going week after week to Monday afternoon two-hour practices, extending Mondays into a grumpy oblivion, one that our youngest struggled with every single week.

But when it came to showtime, Bryce became the over-dramatic consummate entertainer, while Beatrice performed somewhat shyly, delivering much more subdued lines, but working hard, the actor's actor, ensuring she hit her marks each time. Mostly.

Still, for us in the audience who knew the movie and the story, we struggled to follow along, which is what made it all the more memorable. The story for us was one of our children having fun (mostly) and working together with their friends and the director to go all "electric, wavy" when they turned it on.

And turn it on they did. So much fun. Now they're in a shorter production of Dr. Seuss's Oh, the Places You'll Go!, with Bryce playing the little guy with the yellow going to all the places, and with Beatrice taking on multiple lines this time, willingly, including the part about the "waiting place," a place we've all been to in life, where we grind to a halt due to uncertainty and fear, unwilling to take risks and make moves. When we realize and accept that failure is inevitable and quite important to learning life lessons, then the waiting place is only a transitory respite.

That's one of the things we're so proud about our girls, the fact that they're already learning this at a young age, something that will help them when the waiting place gravity slows them in space.

Temporarily, of course, because it's not a race. It's the long run turned on.

You can get so confused
that you'll start in to race
down long wiggled roads at a break-necking pace
and grind on for miles cross weirdish wild space,
headed, I fear, toward a most useless place.
The Waiting Place...

...NO!
That's not for you!

My Boldness Boon

"Whoa, you like to think that you're immune to the stuff, oh yeah
It's closer to the truth to say you can't get enough
You know you're gonna have to face it, you're addicted to love..."

–Robert Palmer, Addicted to Love

Suddenly I was standing by myself in a large room full of fancy-dressed folk, all parents of the kids who go to school with our girls. Some smiled and gave me a thumbs up. Others laughed and pointed. And there may have been a few who grimaced and shook their heads.

Like one of those underwear dreams sometimes people have, I wore only a white t-shirt and boxer shorts, dress socks and nice shoes.

Except this wasn't a dream. It was a promise made months earlier to my wife, who I lovingly call the Mama.

"Wow, you guys actually did it," one of the parents near me commented. "You look great."

"Thank you," I said.

Just a few hours earlier I had asked the Mama if we should reconsider. "No way," she said. "I listened to a podcast recently based on research that girls lose their confidence to be silly, boisterous and bold by age 9, to then stop trying fun and adventurous things. I don't ever want that to happen to me. You know that. Let's keep being different and have fun doing it."

I nodded. "Indeed. That's why I love you, Sweetie."

"It's okay if you don't want to do it, though."

"No, I'm still in. Don't worry."

She smiled and we changed into our costumes. The idea was partially mine, at least in opening up our  big PTA Auction Gala school fundraiser theme to a much broader spy genre, hence validating the Mama's original idea of dressing up like the main characters from Mr. & Mrs. Smith, the cute spy action flick with Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt from 2005. Not the scenes where they were fancy-dressed folk, though. The scene after their house blows up and they're in their underwear. Early on I tried to get her to consider another scene, even another dress-up option, but to no avail.

The main theme of the auction was always supposed to be a James Bond one, but there were some parents who complained about sexism, misogyny and gun violence, and rightly so, whether many others liked Bond or not. So my idea was to have them offer up a broader mix of spy characters, both men and women, that attendees could dress up as if they wanted to.

And they did. However, as I stood there alone, the Mama running around helping in the early evening of the big event, most of the attendees obviously hadn't wanted to.

The Mama is our PTA president, and her along with the auction chairperson and a myriad of other amazing parent volunteers, they put together quite an elegant affair. It's one of the biggest fundraisers of the year for our school, raising thousands of dollars from us parents bidding on donated products and services, as well as amazing artwork from each classroom. The arts program is a big deal at our school and that one of the many areas the PTA funds. Appropriately, most of the attendees dressed up formal for the night -- women in lovely gowns and pant suits, some vintage 1960's, and the men in suits and ties. It's a great night for all the mommies and daddies to raise a little money and a little hell -- all for the kids.

I help out with school activities when I can and when I'm not traveling, and for this particular auction gala, I help put together a video of the kids' class "thank you" pictures and the slide shows. So, for this event, I was the AV (audio-visual) guy, and happy to do it.

There I was, standing in my underwear, with a name-tag on my t-shirt that said "Mr. Smith" (I made the Mama put "Mrs. Smith" on), just to ensure people would know who my character was, even if they were familiar with the movie, which thankfully many were. Thumb ups. Compliments. Snickers. Pointing. The gamut, but mostly positive and fun comments, complimenting our creativity and the Mama's PTA leadership.

I was stressed, though. Not because of how I had dressed; I had already acquiesced to that compromise. No, the reality was I wasn't feeling well, still suffering from residual health issues from last year's scare. I didn't say anything to the Mama until late that night after we got home, not wanting to stress her any more than she already was.

The good news is that we both persevered and helped raise a lot of money for our school. As I watched the Mama thank all the parents in the room for their generosity, I fell in love with her all over again, her boldness such an inspirational boon to our relationship and to the lives of our girls.

And although Brad Pitt I am most certainly not, damn those super hot red rain boots. Mercy me, Mama. Mercy me.