T.S. Eliot is better than Broadway

Another new post? My goodness, what is going on?

I chatted with some students for two whole hours after school today. It was wonderful. I love spending time with my students and just getting to know them as people.

Also, tonight was the awards banquet. Next year I'll be up there giving the awards and the little speech for the all-school play, and I realized something:

I'm going to be in way over my head when it comes to putting on a play next year!

I mean, I'm very excited for it, don't get me wrong. I love theatre, and I love acting. I have a lot of experience on all stages of the theatre process, but I still have never actually directed a play on my own. But even that won't be the hardest part. I have to coordinate schedules, work with the activities director, make sure that I have a venue that works, equipment that works......yikes! I'm a more big ideas person and a thinker. I'm not so much a doer. Little nitpicking things like that are tough for me. So I'm already praying that the play will go over well.

Also, I'm about to go through T.S. Eliot with my seniors (yay!) and that led me to revisit my love the of musical Cats. Well, I should say, my former love. It was my literal obsession when I was about five. Not kidding. Here's how it went down:

My sister and I would invite our friends Sheena and Whitney over to play. We'd put on my parents' record (yes, record, as in vinyl) of the musical and then we'd race up the stairs that led down to the living room. Then it was time to make our grand entrances.

You had to creep down the stairs, gingerly, one foot at a time, and make sure you were extra graceful. You were pretending to be a cat, after all. Then you had to move around the living room in a pre-choreographed dance while mouthing all the words. No real singing allowed.

We always fought over who got to be what cat. As in, we would all crowd around the open record cover, looking at the dingy photographs from the original production, and fight over who got to be which cat. I always wanted to be the one with the sleek bodysuit and the Siamese coloring. My sister and the other girls would fight over who got to be the pure white fluffy cat. She was the prettiest.

I secretly wanted to be her too, but I figured that it wasn't worth fighting over. And hey, the Siamese was very pretty in her own way.

Looking back, our little shows were basically just four girls under six years old crawling around on the floor while a record played in the background, meowing, arguing over being imaginary actresses, and forcing our poor parents to sit through yet another show--same as the last seven.

Ah, simpler times.