Elise's Middle School Stage Debut!

This weekend Elise performed in her middle school's production of "The Mix,"a "salute to Broadway" show that included songs and short scenes from a number of well-known musicals like West Side Story, Wicked, Annie Get Your Gun, Grease, and The Lion King. The students did a great job and I was impressed with all the hard work and energy that all those 6th to 8th grade kids put into pulling off the show.

I was particularly proud of Elise (of course!). Not only did she have the courage to tackle a solo in "Annie Get Your Gun" -- not every kid had a solo, and she did great -- but she even overcame a small snafu on opening night with aplomb. Elise's number, "Anything You Can Do" from Annie Get Your Gun, came right after the big opening number, so Elise and her gang had to make a super-quick costume change involving a plaid shirt. The director had mentioned that the kids might want to button the two bottom buttons of the shirt and then pull it over their heads, but Elise's shirt was pretty tight and it got stuck! So as all the kids for her scene walked out, Elise was still backstage wrestling with her shirt, which would put even a seasoned pro into panic mode.  I admit I was a little nervous for her too as I sat in the audience thinking, "Where's Elise!?!?"  But then she walked in with a smile on her face and picked up with a line that made total sense for the scene; although she missed saying a few lines, nobody in the audience was one bit the wiser. It seemed like it was all meant to be that way.  And even though she was a little out of breath, she found her footing in her song pretty quickly and did a great job.  I was so proud!

Here's a video of Elise's solo performance. The other snafu was mom-related (or technology-related): the minute I started videoing the "memory card full" message started flashing (arrghh!) so I missed the first few lines and the opening of Elise's solo as I switched from the video camera to my cell phone camera. The video and audio quality isn't the greatest, either, since it was filmed on my phone. But I captured enough to at least give you a taste:



I thought I'd let you see one of the big group numbers, too. This is "One Short Day" from Wicked. Elise is the tall one. :-)



And here are some photos taken during "parent photo night"-- a couple of nights before the actual performance, Moms and Dads could come and take all the pictures they wanted while the kids held poses and ran through some of the numbers. A great idea! That way the parents can sit back and enjoy the actual show instead of worrying about taking pictures, and the performers aren't distracted by photography flashes:

Officer Krupke

"Please Officer Krupke!"

Perfecting the look of adolescent angst

Elise as Annie and her Frank Butler

They can shoot a sparrow, with a bow and arrow

The battle of the sexes.

One short day . . . in the emmmerallld city!

The mothers of River City

Elise and the other brainiacs, jocks, and skaters encouraging the students at East High to "Stick to the Status Quo"

And the final group shot!

It was so much fun to see Elise perform and I look forward to lots of musicals in our future. Great job, hon!

Blog Backlog, Chunk #1: The Nerd Herd

So, yes, I know I left the disturbing post up for a little too long (and yes, I also realize that both my hair in the photo and the shirtless hand dancer qualified as disturbing). Lots has been going on at our house and I haven't seemed to find the time to update ye olde blog. So I'm going to break things up into chunks over the next few days.

Chunk 1: The Nerd Herd/Battle of the Books (Jonas)
Chunk 2: Forrest's trips to both Germany and Mexico. Sheesh, that was a long time for me to do the single mom thing. But as least Forrest took some good pictures. And brought home chocolate.
Chunk 3: Elise's musical (first performance tonight--break a leg honey!)
Chunk 4: Miscellania, paraphernalia, juveinila

The Nerd Herd!

So Jonas has been on a "Battle of the Books" team for the past few months. They've read all twelve of the Maud Hart Lovelace nominated novels for 2010 and met every other Wednesday to discuss them, and last night they competed.

Walking into the cafeteria, ready to do battle

Jonas's team competed against 8 other 4th grade teams. They were asked 50 questions related to the twelve books, ranging from "What was the name of so-and-so's uncle" to "why didn't so-and-so want to go to school in the morning?", then they had thirty seconds to whisper possible answers amongst themselves and have the scribe write the answer on a white board.

You'll notice the nice woman sitting holding the green(ish) card in her lap. She's the coach of another team. Coaches went to sit with other teams to serve as a judge. If they got the answer right, the judge would hold up a green card. Wrong? Red. Not sure (e.g. if the wording the boys wrote down didn't exactly match the wording in the official answer)? Yellow. Our judge held up a lot of yellow cards, which necessitated a head judge coming to the table and making the final call. Nine times out of ten the head judge called it in our favor. So while our table judge was a bit of a stickler, it did make things more exciting.

The Nerd Herd was leading up until question 30. In fact, at one point we were up by four and seemed untouchable! But then we had a few missed questions and a couple of close calls (the boys knew the answer but didn't write it down completely) and suddenly, an all girl team to our right surged and before we knew it, the lead had slipped out of our hands!

We ended the night two questions behind the eventual winners, who get to have a pizza party at school (luckies!). But the boys were good sports and had a lot of fun and are going to have their OWN pizza party.

All the kids who read each of the 12 books (not a requirement) got a special ribbon.

I think the best part of this whole thing for Jonas was meeting a group of really nice kids. Two of them live quite close to our house, so hopefully once it warms up they'll be going outside to play sometime soon. (Hooray for going outside to play!).

On other good Jonas news, we just had parent teacher conferences last week, and not only did his teacher say, "Jonas is the type of kid that I would love to get to know as a grown up. He's such a nice person, and he just gets it!", but his grades are excellent and his test scores have improved quite markedly since the beginning of the year. He went from the 86-88th percentile in reading and math on his standardized tests (they tested him when we first moved for placement purposes) to 96-98th percentile when he took the tests last month with the rest of his class. I think the accelerated curriculum (to which we did NOT have access in the ALPs-dominated Jordan School district, much to my dismay) has done him a lot of good. I really like his elementary school and his teacher in particular.

Good job, my super-reader Jonas. Right now he's reading The Little House books. Oh, my mother heart smiled at that! Elise didn't really like them so I didn't think any of my kids would, but after reading a ton of fantasy--which he still claims is his favorite genre--he's decided to read some historical fiction. He read a few WWII books (Number the Stars and The Boy in the Striped Pajamas) and then thought he'd give Little House a whirl.

Anyway, thanks for being such a great kid, Joe. Love you.

To Germany With Love

So on this Valentine's Day, I was thinking about the very best man I know -- yes, the very same man my 16-year old, acid washed, big-haired self managed somehow to woo -- and I wanted to send him a message.  A cryptic message, yes, since this is a public blog, yadda yadda yadda, but it's a message he will understand. And so will some of you.

So I went to Youtube, trying to find the music video for Alphaville's "To Germany With Love." (Fun fact: when I was 16 years old, I went to Washington D.C. all by myself to a national program called Washington Workshops as a representative from Cyprus High School.  Forrest lent me his Grandma's blue suitcase and his Alphaville tape, and I listened to it over and over on both plane rides and at night before I went to bed.) So now, 21 years later, here I sit in my office in our house in Minnesota, surrounded by our four rapidly growing kids and all the stuff we've accumulated over the years, googling "Germany With Love," trying to find something that represents the depth of my feeling for the man who's more responsible for my happiness in this life than anyone else.  And this, dear readers (and dear husband of mine) is what I found.

It seems even more eerily apropos that the "station" where one can find this one-of-a-kind video is called "ForrestTV" (seriously--you can't tell in the embedded video, but look it up on Youtube. Synchronicity?)  This message is for you, my love, brought to you by the very best exhibitionistic balding hand dancer on the internet:

(for my gentler readers: don't worry, the disrobing ends after he takes off his shirt)

On Writing

So my C Jane post went up on Sunday and it was a fun ride. Interesting to think on how it's probably the most widely-read thing I've ever written: a blog post that I labored over for two whole days! It was an honor to be able to do it, though, and even if it doesn't really translate into many Dispensation sales or Irreantum subscriptions, it's satisfying that a few more people know now that such things exist. A step in the right direction, yes?

Now I just need to figure out what my plans are with my own writing. I'm stuck (again) on another novel, feeling like I'm going the wrong direction but a little sick about chucking it all and starting over again. It's easy to stand up and preach the gospel of revision, but man, it never stops being extraordinarily hard to do in practice. Especially when there's no guarantee of anyone actually reading the finished product: three, four years of your life, hours and hours and hours of work, all for the sliver of a chance that it might get an agent, then a tinier sliver of a chance that it will get published, then an even tinier sliver of a chance that, after publication, it will be read instead of slinking off into the ever-crowded corner of literary obscurity to curl up into a ball and die.

Wow. This is really uninspiring.

Part of my own problem has to do with permission.  It's hard for me to give myself permission to write toward such a nebulous goal. And it's galling for me to even write these words since I spend so much energy encouraging others to do that very thing (be brave! you can't be a successful writer until you allow yourself to carve out the time and space necessary to make it work! the vast majority of anything you write will end up discarded -- that's the process!).  But I'm still struggling with it.  Working on Irreantum, working on Dispensation, writing blog posts or essays for Segullah, all those things are easier for me to get my arms around because I know what I'm doing will eventually get out into the world and be read. It justifies the time away from my family, from cooking dinner or folding socks.  It also justifies the really really really hard work. Writing fiction (for me) isn't like reading, which is pure enjoyment, or even other activities that people would call leisurely, like (hey!) blogging or baking or gardening: activities that can be broken up into discrete blocks with discernible results at the end of the day. A new blog post, brownies, a planter of petunias on the front porch.  No, writing fiction requires this kind of leap of faith, coupled with the ability to work hard and be disciplined for the sake of working hard and being disciplined, coupled with a kind of single-mindedness that requires me to shut everyone and anyone else out.  (I can't even have somebody put a hand on my shoulder when I'm writing. Jerks me right out of where I need to be.)

But I'm going to keep plugging away.  Keep writing slowly. While I sit and simmer about my (possibly) abandoned novel, I've started working on a short story. I haven't started a short story in years because I've wanted to spend my fiction writing time on getting a *&(* novel finished, but I think I need the kick in the pants, the creative jolt that starting and finishing a work of fiction will give me.

Wish me luck.

And isn't the sound of all those Egyptians cheering in the streets an inspiring thing?

Cool!

The back yard, winter morning

So the coolest thing about the last week -- and no, I don't mean temperature-cool -- is that Ethan competed in his very first speech tournament and (drumroll!) he won 2nd place in novice storytelling! First time ever, freshman, right outta the gate, baby! Over 900 students from all over the state participated in a number of different categories.  We're really proud of Ethan and know he'll continue to do a a great job the rest of the season.

Elise has been busy with her musical rehearsals every day after school, and it's been fun to hear her upstairs practicing her guitar now that she's taking lessons.  And Jonas has been singing in his school choir and getting ready for his Battle of the Books competition in a couple of weeks. He had to read all 12 books nominated for the Maud Hart Lovelace award, and he and his fellow team members (they christened their team "The Nerd Herd," and I think it means you're not that nerdy if you're able to self-referentially call yourselves The Nerd Herd) will compete in a trivia competition based on the novels. Jonas has also been reading The Series of Unfortunate Events books like a maniac (seriously, like 10 of them in the last few weeks, to the point where he's ignoring things like, ahem, the dreaded "purple packet" whose unfinished contents were the source of much discontent a few mornings ago).

Wyatt is chillin. (See? Extending the cool metaphor.) He made everyone laugh at dinner the other night when he pretended to be me prodding Jonas to eat his dinner: "I'm going to count to three! One, two . . . don't make me get to three!"

Am I really that obvious?  Um, yes.

A yucky cold has been circulating throughout the family, but we're all holding up okay, despite a few missed days of school. The combination of sick kids + icky weather + nothing really much to force me to go outside has turned me into a bit of a hermit.  Strange word, hermit. Not a pretty one. It's bad enough being a hermit; you'd think they could come up with a nicer word to describe us. Like "philanthropist." There's a pretty word. Or "dilettante." That's a perfectly pretty word wasted on amateur wannabe artists.  What I really want to be is a bon vivant, but a bon vivant is the polar opposite of a hermit, yes?  So you see how I'm stuck. And how I like French words.

Oh! The other super cool thing that happened this last week is the birth of Tony and Cindy's sixth baby, this beautiful little bundle of squishy goodness (I'm assuming he's squishy based on photographic evidence and past experience with Tony/Cindy Babies, since I haven't been able to personally squish him):

That makes 16 grandkids on my side, seven boys and nine girls. And more good news: Mindy and Pete will be having another baby this summer, rounding out the cousins on Forrest's side to eight. I'm thinking it has to be a boy for the sake of evenness: three boys and one girl from Forrest, three girls and one boy from Mindy. Seems about right!

So, for more formless rambling, how about this. From the world of current events: everything going on in Egypt is fascinating. I, too, would be irritated if a guy named Hosni had been running my country into the ground since I was a little kid.  Go freedom!  Just don't end up like Iran and we'll all be happy! And I've heard some scuttle that Jon Hunstman is probably going to try for the Republican nomination for President. (He just stepped down from his position as ambassador to China.)  I've always liked him a lot more than I liked Romney. Plus my dad guarded his dad's house, so that makes us almost friends, yes?  Could get me a ticket to the annual Easter Egg Roll on the White House lawn? Should be interesting.  The Mormons! They're everywhere!

And finally, I'm guest posting on C Jane Enjoy It! on Sunday.  Eek! I also need to keep it under 800 words.  Double eek!  I'm going to write a little about stories -- how stories connect us, feed us spiritually, all that.  But much more articulately.  I won't say Eek!  But maybe I'll say dilettante.  Or bon vivant.  Maybe my bio can be "Angela Hallstrom is a dilettante bon vivant hermit who enjoys Top Chef All Stars and period dramas.  And by period dramas, she doesn't mean "menstruation histrionics," (see comments by Andrea and Delise), because who enjoys menstruation histrionics?  Certainly not her loving and ever-patient husband, Forrest. Just ask him."

Bingo!  You'd read a post by that woman, right?

And now, I've gotta go.  Somewhere.  Maybe I'll wander to the upstairs loft.  Little change of scenery and whatnot.  Maybe I'll do some laundry.  Maybe I'll load the dishwasher.  Maybe I'll help Wyatt made a gun out of his Thomas train tracks (his latest project).  All sorts of options!