The Christmas Play and a Trip to Chester

Last week at school it was all about rehearsing for the Christmas play.  Laura, the year-one teacher, took the director's role with Emelda, the reception teacher, assisting.  Me?  I was trying to wrangle butterflies, but mostly, I was in shock at the impossible notion that a performance of 85 four, five, and six-year-olds could possibly be pulled off.  Now, I know that every year of the 21 years I've been producing Shakespeare plays at Steele I have asserted that this is the year that the Steele Shakespearean Players are not going to pull it off.  And they always do.  Where my goal at Steele is a polished, sophisticated, professional looking performance, the goal for the Christmas play is that 85 squirmy, whiny, restless, chatty, telling-on-each-other, touching-each-other, constantly-having-to-"wee", adorable little tiny kids will know their lines and when to say them, know their songs and when to sing them, stay put, not talk, and not escape.  Yeah, right!

Friday was the gift fair.  Every year each class selects a charity and then makes Christmas crafts to sell at the gift fair, the proceeds of which are donated to all the various charities.  Our class made pot-pourri sachets, gift tags, and rustic cinamon sticks tied up in ribbons.  Each class set up a table in the hall that displayed their crafts.  Eileen said everything would sell out.  I wondered about that.  When the hall was open for business, people flooded in and started purchasing.  To my surprise, every one of our items sold quite quickly, and it was the same for all the other classes!  It was lots of fun, and I was very impressed.  The school has a culture of giving to charity, and it begins with teaching the kids to give.
Very admirable.



Christmas in Chester



quirky characters of Chester

  Ahhh, then came the sweet relief of the weekend.  On Saturday I went to a travel agent and booked my final trip before returning to good ol' Colorado.  Sherry Dorman is coming on Sunday, and when school ends on the 16th, we are taking off for a couple of days in London and another couple of days in Edinburgh, Scotland!  I can't wait!  On Sunday, Eileen and I went to the charming Tudor market town of Chester.  What a beautiful place!  An interesting mix of Tudor and Victorian and contemporary shops along cobblestone streets.  

With only a handful of rehearsals under their belts, none of which were fully successful, Monday was performance day for the Infants.  The dress rehearsal was Monday morning in front of the older students and their teachers.  I had been given the very important job of prop-hander-offer (I handed off the props to the kids as they needed them--the Wise Men's gifts, camels on sticks, etc.).  As the parade of shepherds, angels, Wise Men, sheep, stable animals, and of course, Mary and Joseph entered the hall and took their places, we crossed our fingers (and, I'm sure, some made the sign of the cross), hoping and praying that Laura's incredibly patient tutelage took.  And you know what?  It did!  Amazingly, it did!  The kids remembered their lines and cues (for the most part) and sang when they were supposed to sing and entered and exited in mostly the right places (even if the sheep all forgot to pull their sheep heads up and they dangled down the backs of their fluffy costumes).  Tuesday night's performance for a packed house of camera-wielding parents and grandparents was even better.  There were a few missed cues, one thwarted escape, some voices joyfully singing off-key and at different tempos, and many of the kids spent most of their time on stage standing on tiptoes, straining their necks to catch their parents' eye so that they could wave at them to beat the band, while others totally mugged for the cameras.  But that's the thing about little kids' stage performances--all that stuff is cute and they can get away with it because they are adorably cute.  It's not Shakespeare, but it's cute.  And I never want to do it again.

Ostrich burger, anyone?