Theatre-Goers and Their Enthusiasms

Tuesday night was the weekly "evening at the theater" for the children and Amy.  Every week in July and August, they attend a roughly one-hour Disney-themed play staged by a children's theater group in Manchester.  Not entirely my thing... I would almost pay the $7 just to sit and watch them enjoy it, but I have tons of work to keep up with, so I generally sit out the play but then join them for dinner at a nearby taqueria.

In any case, when I caught up with them at "Dos Amigos" this past Tuesday, Daniel had his classic monkey sock-puppet, and Ian had his plush red stuffed monkey.  Suddenly I suspected that these were thematic props of some kind, so I asked.  It turned out that yes, they brought them to the play because they were watching Aladdin, and they were expressing some kind of connection with Aladdin himself, who had a monkey for a mascot, in contrast to Jafar, who walked around with a parrot.

Moreover, Daniel had a glow-stick, for which Amy paid one dollar.  I attended Rapunzel,  from the children's theater series a week ago, because this was a production very close to Madeleine's heart, and I noticed many children in the audience, including our own, tended to brandish glow-sticks, often in time to the music and in response to some inspirational theme being celebrated, or at the starry climax of the play.  So Daniel had another glow-stick again this week, which he used to play "catch" as the boys and I took a walk down Elm Street [sic], while we were waiting for our tacos.  [Last week, Ian went on a glow-stick-purge on the night of the play, after bedtime, picking up glowsticks and their glowing, green, nuclearish fallout on the carpet.  It was a very unselfish act, but it had a kind of Three Mile Island dauntingness about it...]

So Daniel had a glow-stick, but Ian did not.  Why?  The glow-stick cost a dollar, and Ian got Amy simply to give him the dollar, rather than wasting it on some transient scrap of merchandise.  Daniel is my Irish baby.  Ian seems much less Hibernian... I'm assuming that my Scottish side, whose practicality and thriftiness never really "took" in my case is kicking in, in the next generation, yet again, with its brooding Celtic vengeance.

(August 7, 2012)