deadlightsgirl | Musical Gracie!

Let me just say this - as usual, the special event at her school was a lot wonderful and a teeny bit heartbreaking. The sad state of some of these kids...I often feel like I am cheating the system a bit, to be honest. But the care taken by the school and staff to include and interest them is just gorgeous. They even had this doohickey (a Linguistic Augmentation Device, I think they called it) set up with lines in the right order, so the kids who were nonverbal could go up, press this button, and the doohickey would speak the line for them. They also had the whole script printed in the program they passed out, so everyone would be able to understand everything everyone said, and of course everyone had their own TA to escort them to the microphone when it was their turn to speak.

Gracie knew I was coming, but when I got there and she saw me in the front row, her whole face lit up like a Christmas tree. She kept giggling and saying "Mama's here!" and running over to hug me. She looked adorable in her costume and rainbow wig (get it, she was a clownfish), and she got to keep them, though she didn't much want to keep them on during the first show.

The show was some weird thing in verse called "Under The Sea", no relation to anything Disney. The songs weren't from anything else I recognised. All the kids were fish of some kind, and so adorable - they had costumes and hats (pics on my Facebook). The songs were done by the school chorus, this group of older kids, some of whom also had roles. Gracie had one line, which she had practised in school and with me ("Hahaha hey! We're the clownfish here! We'll tell the jokes!") The first performance (there were two), she got a little spooked - she wouldn't wear her wig, she said her line into the mic super-quietly, and when she was done, she ran over to me, climbed into my lap, and cried a little and suggested we go home. She shook it off, though, and at the end of the show she was very happy to take me back to her classroom and out onto the playground. When they went back in to have lunch, I walked down the road to the deli for a sandwich, and I spent the rest of the break walking around this lovely outdoor workout circuit I didn't even know they had - this lovely quarter-mile path round a pond with exercise equipment at various points.

The second performance, my mom joined me (Gracie was thrilled to see Grammy), and Gracie did MUCH better. Kept her wig on, didn't need to come over to me, and when she went up to say her line, she took the mic and would've stood there ad-libbing all day if her TA hadn't intervened. She was a little impatient and wriggly, but stayed in her seat until the play ended. I think she enjoyed herself, eventually.