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Monday, August 15, 2011

Our Weekend: A Tale as Old as Time


Had a mighty nice weekend. On Friday, Lily and Jen and Oma and I all went to Nicolosi's for dinner and then to the Country Gate Players to see a performance of Beauty and the Beast.

It was a "Beauty & the Beast Jr." production performed by kids ages 9-18. All of the kids in the production were good, but the actress who played Belle was absolutely phenomenal. The delivery of her lines was flawless, her singing was so good and sounded so much like the movies that I thought she was lip syncing to the soundtrack until she briefly lost her composure and her laugh came over the speakers. Most of the kids were solid, but she was performing on another level.  (Also, Belle was a good three inches taller than Gaston.)

Lily liked it, though not as much we thought she might. She wore her Belle dress and was generally pretty good.At one point she asked who villain of the piece was and we told her that it was Gaston. She thought for a moment and said, "Well, he's a pretty good looking villain." She also observed that Belle had "nice shoes!"

It was a somewhat abbreviated version, with some songs I didn't recognize, probably added from the Broadway version, and constrained by the budget of a local show. (The bit I mentioned above, when Belle laughed is when the Beast brought her into his library and she was marveling "I've never seen so many books!", but it was the same bare stage they'd been using for the rest of the sets.) They had a couple solid effects, such as smoke coming upfrom below stage to hide the costume change of the witch into the enchantress and the Beast into the prince. Very nice. I was glad we could be a part of it.

That was our Friday. On Saturday, we hung out for a bit and did some shopping for the all the birthdays we have coming up, and then I took off to hang out with the boys at Frederick's house. If you're interested in reading about that, then follow this link.

On Sunday, we went to the birthday party for one of Lily's little friends. She was mostly good, but she was pretty cutthroat during Hot Potato. And there's nothing wrong with that itself, but she was the only one playing to win, fairly thrusting the egg they were using at the other kid, while the other four and five-year-olds were just kind of lackadaisically passing it after a short period of reflection. (At one point, I thought she was going to shank somebody) The adults controlling the music saw this and they tried to stop it when she had it, but she kept passing it off. Hot Pototo probably isn't the best game for that age range, because you've got six sad kids and one winner.

Otherwise it was pretty good. She worked hard on the card, and played well with the other kids. She commented that the one dinosaur looked "realistic" and Jen and I die a little inside when we hear words like that and think that she missed the cutoff to start kindergarten by three days.

Of course, she doesn't always use her powers for good. We were cajoling her to eat and she was turning her nose up at breakfast.

Me: It makes us sad when you don't appreciate cooking. What if you worked on a card very hard on a card and you gave it to somebody and-

Lily: (dismissively) -and they didn't like it? Yeah, I'd be fine with that.

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