Charlotte made her stage debut Saturday night as Pig Number Three in a play about the trial of the Big Bad Wolf. In this photo, she is delivering her big monologue about how the BBW tried to demean her and her sisters by calling them “pigs”.

The play came at the end of an excruciatingly long evening of plays presented by the local children’s theater group that Charlotte joined a couple of months ago. As an alumnus of children’s theater myself, I realize that small children are not usually all that comfortable on stage, but there was no excuse for the complete lack of preparation on the part of the adults running the program. You can see in the picture that Charlotte has her script with her on stage, but for the most part she knew all her lines cold and was hanging on to the script as a security blanket. Most of the other children, including the older children, who really had no excuse for not knowing their lines, read mechanically from their scripts all evening. It was as if the children had never rehearsed at all and were doing a table reading for the first time. Beyond that, the night of the performances was the first time any of the kids had been on the stage at the middle school, where the show was held, and nobody knew where to stand, where to move, or how to project their voices. On top of that, the people running the show had no idea how to use the lighting or sound systems in the auditorium. The performances began a little after 7:00 p.m. but did not finish until 10:00 p.m. because the plays moved so slowly. Ten o’clock may not be too late for a 12-year-old, but that was way too late for the younger kids like Charlotte.

As you can tell, neither Bridget nor I were terribly impressed with the efforts of the adults. There were a lot of other parents also openly wondering why they paid these people money for such a slipshod program. I don’t think they’ll be around very long.

My own experience on stage began the summer I was twelve going on thirteen (that would be 1976, for those of you trying to figure it out). One of the middle school teachers who was active in the local community theater had convinced the town’s recreation department to let her do a summer theater program for kids. A fair number of the kids who showed up that first summer were themselves the children of other community theater folks, but my brother Tim and I joined because we were looking for something to do for the summer and I had been writing plays to perform at school for several years at that point. We spent every morning for six weeks or so in the auditorium of the old high school, and the play we did that summer was “Snow White”. Like Charlotte’s group, the kids in our group ranged from as young as six or seven to as old as fifteen. Even though I was not the oldest kid, I looked older at 12 than most everyone else, so I played Snow White’s father, the king. In fact, I would be typecast in that part for most of my time as an actor, playing assorted kings in several different shows. The king is not a particularly significant role in “Snow White”, but all the younger kids got the roles of the dwarves, and, let’s face it, I am NO Prince Charming. More importantly, though, our director made us learn our lines, even the little kids, and everyone learned their blocking, learned how to stand on stage and project our voices out into the audience, learned our entrance and exit cues, and generally learned as much stagecraft as you could cram into the brains of a bunch of kids on summer vacation.

Some of us fell deeply in love with theater that summer, and for the next ten years of my life there was scarcely a time when I was not involved in performing or producing some sort of show. Those of us who stuck with the summer program eventually moved on together into the high school drama club and even into the community theater. A few even went on to become theater professionals of one sort or another. The kids I grew up with on stage became my best friends. It is no exaggeration to say that wandering into that auditorium one humid June morning in 1976 transformed my entire life.

I know I am not supposed to push my own passions and dreams onto my child, but I also know that Charlotte has the same little spark inside her that I had. She has been involved in several sport activities the last couple of years, and has fun, but clearly is not all that interested in being an athlete. She also just performed in her annual dance recital for the third year in a row, and likes the thrill of the recital but not the discipline of dancing (although this year she did hip-hop and liked it a lot better than the tap/ballet classes). When she stepped out on stage Saturday night, though, with her nerd glasses and big rubber pig snout, I knew that she was right where she belonged. Well, except that I don’t think she belongs with this particular group. We need to find a different place where she can go and not just have fun but really learn how to perform on stage. In the town where I grew up, there was no such thing as private programs for children’s theater when I was her age, but here there are lots of them.

I grew out of my theater phase when I got to college. I went to Northwestern, which has a huge reputation for its theater program and all the famous actors who came out of there, and my original intention was to study theater. But I was unprepared for the more competitive and unpleasant aspects of a theater program where everybody wanted to be a star (and some people would become stars) and turned my interests elsewhere. I only did one play in college, a horrible production of “Dracula”, though some friends and I had a musical comedy act that we performed all the way through my undergrad years. It’s okay with me if theater is just a childhood pasttime for Charlotte, too. It’s also okay if she decides she’d rather do some other activity, but I suspect that Pig Number Three will turn into quite the ham.