An Evening at the Theater

I don't get to the theater much.

In fact, I never have, because plays are generally few and far between and expensive and hard to get to...

But now that we have three children, we see a lot of plays, and tonight's performance was particularly uplifting. The dramatis personae consisted of Daniel and Madeleine, and they figured out a theme that would appeal to both of the main actors. Daniel explained:

"The play is about fighting with light sabers and about somebody who didn't have kids for a long time."

Daniel was true to his word. The first part consisted of a light saber duel between Daniel and Madeleine - with the two-sided light sabers (genuine article) that make whooshing noises if you push the right button. Daniel explained the rules of engagement:

"If your light saber hits yourself, that's okay, but if it hits somebody else, that means that they're dead."

But the next part, involving a childless couple, was far more dramatic.

Daniel set up Madeleine's play house - more like a plastic lean-to, complete with kitchen sink and washer and drier, and set a dining room chair at least a foot and a half feet from the set. That was where the audience sat.

I can't read all of my writing from the performance, since it went so quickly and my writing is illegible even under the best of circumstances, but I did catch a few highlights, such as the despairing childless father:

"Oh my goodness... I wonder if we will have children... Oh, I'm going to go to the bathroom...

Okay, we need some children, so how are we going to get children..."

The aspiring father looked in the yard, and got very excited at seeing a number of children playing there, from whom he could select some for his own progeny, but this appearance turned out to be something of a mirage, much to his chagrin. But he didn't give up:

"Hey, let's go i the garage if there's any children."

It turned out that the garage* had "hundreds and thousands" of children [I think that was the quantification] - so he and Madeleine took six of them, carrying the invisible-to-the-unenlightened babies sweetly in their arms. Their names turned out to be Ian and Daniel. [I don't know how the numbers work out with six children and two names...]. Madeleine said, "And Madeleine," but Daniel disagreed.

The drama ended very happily, and then another light saber battle ensued, like variety shows in some cultures that compare opera, juggling and acrobatics. [I saw such a show in Beijing some years ago.]

I light stories with a happy ending, so I left the front-hall theater quite gratified, knowing that the couple who longed so desperately for children had the good sense to look in the garage, and proceeded into the bright future as a happy family of eight.

*The children surely know, from our own domicile, that there are endless possibilities for enrichment and discovery in the storage space known as the garage.

(July 16, 2011)