Tale of Two Islands... "I see stupid people."

By far this was the best play Jessica's ever been in.

She was spectacularly magical as the Magic Fish. She stole the show in the church Christmas Pageant a few years back when she was one of the 3 blonde female kings who together broke character and gestured to the star in the back of the church in the famed ZZ Top move. As the years have passed, the girl has been a bright little star on stage. Like a thespian Zeubenelgenubi!

The flickr set of like a million pictures is here. Click and go check out their stage performance genius! The play had a huge cast, with the two islands having core story/lead parts and then a large cast of islanders who supported the story without lines. The story was written by the theatre teacher and the kids wrote the bulk of the dialog. There were incredibly keen insights into how "Utopia" and "Urbania" (the hippies and the business minded) were like on the underside. One of the funniest parts was Utopia's leader talking about how no one is a winner over the others in Utopia, we are all equal and all win. It echoed the exchange between Dash and Elastigirl in "The Incredibles" where they talk about how everyone is special, so in reality no one is special.

And the "No Sheep Left Behind" line on Utopia got a ton of laughs from the parents.

Jessica got some big laughs even though she didn't have a lot of lines. She steps forward and starts yelling into the audience "Bridge? I don't see a bridge. I just see a lot of people. Ugly people." And I told her she had to add smelly to her diatribe and she did and made a horrible face and got a lot of laughs.

The great thing about this play was the chance to totally over act the parts. Be the super crotchety grandma. The extra super flakey hippy chick. The ... silly cow. But not to over act so much that it detracts from everything else going on up on stage. There was a beauty pageant, a mall robbery, a parade of produce, a visit to Hug A Tree Day, a love story, tragic death, and a happy ending. All in 2 hours. Perfectly done.

They really did a bang-up job. I went to three performances and therefore do not qualify as "crazy" stage mom because I fell short of my final goal, ice cream...

Jessica's character spends an entire scene whining that she wants ice cream. Because I skipped the final performance but had pick-up and bring to cast party duties, I stopped at the store on the way and got her a pint of Ben & Jerry's. I wanted to slip backstage and have a cast member hand it to her for curtain call. But they did the play faster than the prior three runs, so I got there when they were already done. The gag still went over big, but I felt I'd failed in providing her a great comedic moment on stage. Sigh. I handed her the ice cream in the hallway, and a bunch of kids started yelling "OH YEAH! Grandma got her ice cream!!!" and she shared it with a few and it got big cheers. We managed to get lost on the way to the cast party (thank GOD I had the GPS with us. Meh!).

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In other news, I didn't mention it because it sometimes isn't all about me me me, my birthday was Saturday. I turned 39. My parents were here for the first Saturday performance and then we went out to dinner between shows. The waiter shared the birthday with me. He even showed me his ID to prove it. 10 years younger than I am. I had Doug leave him a nice big tip.

We had a bonfire that night too, for my birthday... because the weather was agreeable and you all know how much I just love burning crap.

We enjoyed burning the couch that we disassembled a few weeks back, and we threw on the pumpkins from Halloween just to see what would happen. They got all mushy and melty and ended up soaking the coals in the fire... that sucked, but it was fun to take pictures of them! There is a set of pictures in flickr if you have the guts to go see pumpkins burning to death. Mwah ha ha ha ha. Again I say, Mwah ha ha! Click here to go to the set of pictures. Mwah ha.