The Play's the Thing
Dec. 18th, 2012 09:54 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
xylieJim and I both love the theater. I'm painfully shy and had to take several classes to learn confidence on stage and public speaking. I bet that surprises you, but there it is. The only thing that helps is for me to forget where I am and lose myself in a role.
Jake's quite the other way. A bit of his father in him, but he loves being on stage, always has. Until this year when they gave him the role of Gabriel. Any normal church would have let Jake stand up say, "Guess what Mary, you're going to have a baby and name him Jesus," but we go to one of those intellectual churches where everyone has PhD in rocket science or econ. Jim and I love it, but it doesn't work so well for Jake who encountered entire paragraphs of lines straight from the King James Version of the Bible.
About the week before the play director and I realized this was killing Jake's interest in the whole thing. He was stumbling over lines, tired, and unwilling to practice. As a kid I read Ruth Rendell's A Judgement in Stone (I also read Casino Royale waaaay before I should have) and it hit me in the gut how insensitive I can be to people with reading issues. I've tried to be better since, but I've been so busy with work I was slow on the uptake.
Jake liked the costume. Angel wings with real feathers? Wow.
He did not like the lines and clung to them on stage. He's never had to do that. He's memorized everything since he could talk and done just fine with it. I felt like crap. But I was not the only parent in our dynamic duo to feel so.
Whilst teaching our son how to declaim and project, Jim leaned over the balcony and told us to pipe down. Once I explained to the DH that the kiddo was practicing going without a mike, he understood. But the damage was done. Jake didn't want to speak above a whisper. Eventually we solved this by getting a microphone for him onstage.
Someday when he's an angry teen and he looks back on how much we messed up here, can one of you explain to him that we loved him? We're just clueless sometimes. We wanted to help him and support him, but we managed to suck the fun out of being the main part in a play. All with the best of intentions. We can only hope to do better next year.
Jake's quite the other way. A bit of his father in him, but he loves being on stage, always has. Until this year when they gave him the role of Gabriel. Any normal church would have let Jake stand up say, "Guess what Mary, you're going to have a baby and name him Jesus," but we go to one of those intellectual churches where everyone has PhD in rocket science or econ. Jim and I love it, but it doesn't work so well for Jake who encountered entire paragraphs of lines straight from the King James Version of the Bible.
About the week before the play director and I realized this was killing Jake's interest in the whole thing. He was stumbling over lines, tired, and unwilling to practice. As a kid I read Ruth Rendell's A Judgement in Stone (I also read Casino Royale waaaay before I should have) and it hit me in the gut how insensitive I can be to people with reading issues. I've tried to be better since, but I've been so busy with work I was slow on the uptake.
Jake liked the costume. Angel wings with real feathers? Wow.
He did not like the lines and clung to them on stage. He's never had to do that. He's memorized everything since he could talk and done just fine with it. I felt like crap. But I was not the only parent in our dynamic duo to feel so.
Whilst teaching our son how to declaim and project, Jim leaned over the balcony and told us to pipe down. Once I explained to the DH that the kiddo was practicing going without a mike, he understood. But the damage was done. Jake didn't want to speak above a whisper. Eventually we solved this by getting a microphone for him onstage.
Someday when he's an angry teen and he looks back on how much we messed up here, can one of you explain to him that we loved him? We're just clueless sometimes. We wanted to help him and support him, but we managed to suck the fun out of being the main part in a play. All with the best of intentions. We can only hope to do better next year.
