The Snow White dream again

Snow White’s babies were missing and I couldn’t find them anywhere. Just as I started to panic, they turned up in the art room of my old elementary school.

No, this wasn’t a fever dream, though I realize it certainly sounds like one. It was a typical moment in my somewhat mercurial tenure as Co-Chair of Props for the Seventh Grade Play.

“Let’s do this together; it will be fun!” I said to my friend Leigh on a beautiful sunny evening last May as we gathered with about thirty other parents to plan our kids' upcoming seventh grade musical. Leigh and I were poring over the sign-up sheet and noticed a big blank space next to the line for co-chairs of props.

I have very little background in the theatrical arts other than reading plays and attending them, but I didn’t think being in charge of props sounded too difficult. In fact, I thought it would be like a scavenger hunt. Something along the lines of finding, say, a flashlight, a set of postcards, a book of nursery rhymes, a stopwatch, some pieces of fruit; boxing them up neatly; and delivering them to the auditorium a couple of weeks before showtime, and we’d be done.

But when Leigh and I received our list of items from the producers the first week in January, with two months to go before curtain, I realized it wasn’t going to be quite that easy. Leigh and I pored over this list just as we had the initial sign-up, only this time was notably different in that neither of us uttered the words “It will be fun!”

“A bloody cloak?” we muttered to each other instead. “A sheep-herding crook? A pumpkin…in March? Watermelon…in March? And what in the world is a glowing bag?”

One of the producers leaned over. “About that bag….it needs some kind of remote control so that the actor can alter the amount of light emanating from within as the scene unfolds. You’ll probably need to work with a fairly accomplished electrical engineer.”

Okay, it wasn’t quite that bad in the end, but it also wasn’t quite as lighthearted as a scavenger hunt. Still, being co-chair of props gave me plenty of opportunities to hone my somewhat meager arts-and-crafts skills as well as my hunting-and-gathering skills. I collected bunches of straw and sticks for the three little pigs; I fashioned a mock “Princess for Dummies” book with a bright yellow and black construction paper cover (my props list included only the title, leaving me free to ad-lib the rest; I listed “Kate Middleton” as the author, “with a foreword by Maria Shriver”).

Meanwhile, helpful friends and other parents involved with the play contributed plastic bread loaves, scarves, knitting needles, and tea set items to our collection of props; my 9-year-old even let us borrow her beloved plastic sword acquired when she was a knight for Halloween.

Nonetheless, hard as I worked to collect what we needed and keep track of it all, during the weekend before our final week of rehearsals, I couldn’t find Snow White’s babies in their carrier (the play we were doing has sort of a post-modern fairy tale theme). I looked everywhere in my house and garage; I even emailed the young actress who was playing Snow White to see if perhaps she’d taken them home after the last rehearsal. No luck. One of the costume committee members had hand-sewn the baby carrier, and the stage manager had provided four dolls that fit in it perfectly; re-creating this prop was way beyond my creative aptitude. So yes, I really did put in a sleepless night worrying about where Snow White’s babies might be.

But the next morning at nine a.m. I stopped by the kids’ school and searched around the auditorium until the babies and their carrier turned up, in the former art room that now serves as the “Green Room” where actors sit before their stage entrances.

The play ran for three consecutive days late last week; now it’s all behind us. Leigh and I agreed that our initial instincts were right, if admittedly a little short-sighted: it was a lot of fun to do together, the kind of experience that cements a friendship the same way that, say, being lost on a mountaintop during a blizzard for a night or two awaiting rescue might do.

It’s another three years before my younger child will have a seventh grade play, and that gives me plenty of time to decide whether I would choose to work on props again. Most likely, yes: I had fun doing it and learned a bit about theater and crafts in the process. But next time I’ll be sure to appoint a special group within the Props Committee: Snow White’s Babies Child Care Subcommittee. No more sleepless nights for me next time around.

Thanksgiving, as performed by the third grade

Yesterday morning I attended a Thanksgiving play in Holly’s third-grade classroom, a 13-scene musical drama that gives every child in the class the chance to play the part of a modern-day grandparent, a Pilgrim woman, a 17th-century Wampanoag tribesman, an ear of corn, or some other critical role in the Thanksgiving story.

It was a good production, just as it was when Tim was in the same play three years ago. From my perspective, it seems to reflect a vital if somewhat fabled narrative from U.S. history in simple but honest terms, and aspects that are sometimes overlooked, such as how miserable the Pilgrims were during their 66 days at sea and how difficult it was for them to survive their first New England winter, will likely stay in these kids’ memories as they learn more about U.S. history.

In a way, productions such as this one seem kind of anachronistic. By today’s standards of diversity, the traditional tale of Pilgrims learning from Native Americans, or “Indians,” how to plant crops, seems a bit quaint; it’s more typical at our school to see a depiction of a little-known Serbian folk tale than something as traditionally American as the Thanksgiving story.

But I’m glad this pageant hasn’t gone the way of Christmas, considered too Eurocentric and Christian to hold a place in the school setting. As Holly’s teacher pointed out to us, putting on a classroom play deploys all kinds of skills and lessons. On the most basic level, there was history in learning the story, art in designing the scenery, music in practicing the theme song. But there was also poise in learning to deliver lines effectively, group cooperation skills enhanced by working in sync with classmates, patience in waiting for other kids to deliver (or remember) their lines, even the skill of flexibility, embodied by two children who took on extra lines and jobs in yesterday’s performance to cover for an absent classmate.

Like most public schools, ours focuses a lot these days on benchmarks and data. Measuring the knowledge developed by spending three or four weeks preparing a play is harder than measuring math acquisition or reading comprehension, and yet to spend a half-hour in the classroom watching these twenty kids perform is to realize how much happens in their minds as they work on this kind of undertaking. Not least is the fact that their own teacher wrote the play and its theme song; for a child like mine who says – at least for now – that she doesn’t really like being on stage, it introduces the idea that there are other roles besides acting within the wider realm of drama – playwrights, lyricists, costume designers – and that creativity takes on myriad forms.

I appreciate the chance I had yesterday to attend the play. Not only is it always fun to see Holly and her classmates working on something together, but it’s good to be reminded even in the simplest terms possible of the events that brought about modern-day Thanksgiving. By this evening, I’ll be elbow-deep in stuffing and pumpkin pie filling, with still more to do tomorrow morning before dinner is ready to serve. It’s easy to get lost in the culinary details of Thanksgiving dinner. Moreover, on Sunday mornings throughout the year as I rush to get ready for church, I hardly ever stop to think about the fact that going to church is a choice I’m able to make. Thanks to my visit to the third grade, I’ll be thinking about those poor seasick Pilgrims and how profoundly important religious freedom was to them as I chop onions and set the table.