From Provo to Prague in an Evening

On Wednesday Rob held the Pinewood Derby. You can tell what sort of week it's been by the fact that neither father nor son is wearing his uniform. We began late and Will had to leave early, so he only got in a couple of heats before I ran him across town. One of the little brothers got to race his car and was over the moon about it. Unfortunately Sebastian wasn't the little brother -- he was home with strep waiting for his amoxicillin to kick in.
Will had to make it back to school to perform in his class play I Never Saw Another Butterfly. It is about children in the Terezin (or Theresienstadt) concentration camp in the Czech republic and uses their actual names, dates and the poems they wrote for their secretly-held school.
I cry at everything -- like Rosie O'Donnell and Meg Ryan in Sleepless in Seattle who cry at the commercial where they bring in the new refrigerator with the big bow on it; or at beer commercials, and I don't even drink beer. So I took a box of kleenex with me. I used a ton.
It was a gutwrenching play to watch, but I was so blown away by the kids' ability to pull it off. It was heavy, it was dark, it was scary, and some people had lines that went on and on and on and yet they did it and with a lot of maturity.
And since my son knew German, guess how he was cast? Yup.
He went stomping around the stage with his homeboy here, yelling "Achtung!" and the like. I didn't want to take a picture of him at all, but though he was double cast, his other part was as a loudspeaker, reading the dates of the deceased.
May he never need jackboots again.
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Comments

Zina said…
Speaking of the need for tissues, I just read the last three posts in reverse chronological order, and Rob's poem completely took me off guard. Maybe by the principle of opposition in all things, the U-bend has a corresponding opposite curve (only visible when wearing special lenses) and we're in the best of times precisely while in the worst of times.

You should definitely keep asking for poems as gifts.

Also, in London I would go on the Ferris wheel, which is probably the newest and least tourist-worthy thing there, but I love Ferris wheels, and my several attempts to ride the one at California Adventure were all thwarted, so I made Dean promise to take me to the one in London. (He says there's also a pretty good one in Vienna. Hmm.)
7:12 PM
Ann said…
That was just your Wednesday? Hope everyone is feeling better.
8:37 PM
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