And The Classroom Was My Stage

I think we've established that I was a drama geek in Jr/High School.  Right?  I really should have linked to all of my previous posts mentioning my theatrical experience but let's be honest, I'm not much for tagging, I've got eight-hundred-and-sixty-some-odd posts to sift through and I'm not a fan of the search function in this latest version of blogger so If you missed those posts you're out of luck unless you want to search for them yourself.

Finding a good monologue can be tricky.  There are a lot, and I mean a LOT of lame-o monologues out there.  When you're in ninth grade Drama class and students are selecting their own material you tend to be exposed to a good percentage of them. Though, the class assignment pieces were generally less awful than student selected audition pieces for high school musicals.  That was rough.

Ms Green, the Drama teacher at my jr high liked to assign one monologue per year and then round things out with plenty of lip-sync assignments. Obviously she held a pretty high standard when it came to the art form known as Theatre.

She chose the top students from among her classes and assembled them into what she called the "Traveling Troupe" When you were a member of said troupe you were excused from your classes for an entire day during which time you sat in the "Little Theater" and preformed your lip-sync over and over.  Other teachers were invited to sign up to bring their classes in for a bit of theatrical entertainment.

I was a star.

I was a member of every "Traveling Troupe" Ms Green got up during my years at the school.  I also played "Ma" in the school play "Mountain Madness" which was everything you'd imagine it to be based on its title and the fact that the director thought of lip-syncing as the ultimate among the theatre arts.

That is to say, it was crap.

Anyway, there was the matter of the monologue assignment lost and forgotten though it was among all the lip-syncing. Around the time the assignment came up my mother brought home a new book.  "Purple Green and Yellow" By Robert Munnsch.  I loved it.  I memorized it and I preformed it in Drama class.  By that time Ms Green had stopped organizing troupes for works as lowly as monologues so I never got the chance to preform it to a packed audience.  I had to settle for just the one day in class.

That is...Until today!

Zizza's class is studying Mr Munsch's work and writing him letters.  Ziz came home last week and told me when she learned that he'd written "Purple, Green and Yellow" I emailed her teacher almost immediately to ask if I could come and recite for the class.  She said yes.

It was fantastic, my favorite parent volunteer job to date.  The part where Zizza, who was holding Duke at her desk while I preformed, filled his hands with pointy pencils pointy side up(of course) and tried to douse him with hand-sanitizer was tricky, but since there wasn't an actual stage for me to stand on I was able to work a maternal intervention into my blocking without much trouble. So it as pretty much perfect.