That is one of my favorite descriptions of what happened on Saturday night for us. I wasn’t clever enough to think of it myself, but I am shamelessly grabbing the line for my blog post title, since it perfectly sums up recent events.
As I’ve hinted at here and there, our home life got turned upside down when my ten-year-old got a significant part in the local high school musical, Les Mis, which is set at the French Revolution. There were a lot of late night rehearsals, working around the schedules of everyone else in the family, giving up recess at school to get homework done, weird meals and bedtimes, putting off work and income, and a very neglected house.
Saturday evening was the fourth and final show, to be followed by a very late cast party. The mood was bittersweet. On the one hand, he was sad to see it almost at an end. He had a lot of fun, made some great friendships and discovered that he had an amazing talent and the ability to focus and take direction (proud momma).
On the other hand, he was ready to give up all of the hard work and get back to being a kid who has time to play in the woods, see his best friend and build things with legos.
We were into the second act, a major character had just been shot and was dying on stage, and my son was in the wings ready to do a big scene when suddenly everything went dark. The performers soldiered on to finish the scene without the lights, and with a bare minimum of musical accompaniment.
The emergency lights went on, the musical was officially halted and the actors and crew waited patiently while the directors made the decision to replay the act on another night. The night before my son has a major standardized test. So much for life returning to normal.
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