Performance Anxiety

Yesterday we got up even before the dog woke us so we could hurry over to the Tulsa Community College Performing Arts Center to get a good seat to watch our granddaughter, Hayley, perform a couple of numbers from "Little Shop of Horrors" with the members of the theater class she has been attending all school year.  We sat for two hours through, approximately 4,327 other kids singing and dancing, some of them quite amazing (in many senses of the word) and finally, in the last fifteen minutes, Hayley and her group came out.  She was third from the left, as I had to continually point out to her PawPaw, but I don't know why he had trouble finding her among all the twenty other girls in green polka-dot dresses; she was obviously the one with the most talent up there!

Then we jumped in our car immediately after the show and drove two hours down the turnpike to watch our second granddaughter, Emily's, dance recital, following the MapQuest map to the Luther, OK school administrative building instead of to the high school where we were supposed to be.  Thank the Lord for cell phones because by staying on the phone with our son through all the turns we made it to the right place just in time to sit in another Performing Arts Center and watched another group of kids performing their hearts out and, amazingly enough, our granddaughter was the best one again! What are the odds? 

In the weeks before, we had attended our grandson, David's, band concert (the star trombone player!) and almost all of Miranda's softball games.  (She may not have been chosen MVP but I'm sure it was only because her Dad was the coach and didn't want to appear to show favoritism.)

Things are different now than they were in the last century when I was a kid.  I didn't know anybody who  took ballet or even played organized sports.  It may have been that no one we knew could have afforded to pay for any such thing or it may have just been that kids were too busy playing in the neighborhood to have time for lessons and so on, but if they happened anywhere, I didn't know about it.

The closest I ever got to a recital (I wouldn't have recognized the word) was a performance that my fifth grade class put on one time.  It was going to be on a Wednesday night, so I knew my parents wouldn't be able to come since this was also Prayer Meeting night and my dad, being the preacher, would be at church instead. My mother was always dutifully at his side. I'm pretty sure here in the Bible Belt a school function wouldn't be held on Wednesdays but in St. Louis, this was the regularly scheduled PTA night.  My parents had never been to a PTA meeting for that reason.

The sketch was a depiction of Alice in Wonderland's encounter with the Queen of Hearts.  Everyone was going to wear kind of a cardboard sandwich board of one of the cards in the hearts suit and march around in formation.  Immediately I knew I had a problem: playing cards was considered a sin for Baptists in that part of the world and if I couldn't play them, how could I be one?  I don't remember if I thought of it, (being either a child prodigy or just desperate to not be left out) or if one of the teachers did, but someone remembered that I was in possession of a lovely red formal with a poufy skirt from when I was a junior bridesmaid in my sister's Valentine's Day wedding.  Perfect! I would wear that dress, march around imperiously, and be the Red Queen. I could shout "Off with her head!" while all the playing cards marched around me. Suddenly, I was the star!  (I don't even remember if there was an Alice.  She was inconsequential to the Queen, at best.)

Now, whenever Miranda gets up to bat at her softball games she looks over to the stands and yells, "PawPaw!!!" to be absolutely sure that he is watching her and she is never disappointed.  I, on the other hand, did not expect to have any family members in the audience at DeHart Elementary School when we put on our performance.  I don't recall that it bothered me;  that's just the way it was.  My mom had dropped me off at school and gone on to church, I guess, and I felt lucky that I was even able to be there myself and not at Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting.

The music swelled, the Ten of Hearts, the Nine of Hearts, the Eight of Hearts and all their...ahem, co-horts...began marching around the stage.  Soon it was my cue and I glided out onto the stage, red skirt swaying, ready to say my line.  And there, front and center in the audience, was the whole congregation of Mary Ann Baptist Church's Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting, with the preacher and his wife on the front row.

Did he call off Prayer Meeting for that night?  Of course not.  They just relocated, my dad told me later, and had the meeting in the school auditorium.  I'm not sure what those good Baptists thought about having all those sinful playing cards marching around, life-sized, but I know that the preacher's daughter has never forgotten seeing them all there. And my dad was pretty sure I was the best, most talented kid on the stage.