My kid is in band for the first time this year playing the clarinet. Yreka is so lucky because we have Mrs. Garrett, a super talented music teacher for ALL the grade school level music in Yreka! Wow! She must be exhausted!! But she always puts on a great show!
So despite the blizzard-like conditions with snow accumulating by the minute, proud parents and grandparents and the like made it out for the holiday concert for 5th - 8th graders. I was pretty excited because the group that my kid was in was scheduled to play first and I thought, “cool, I can do the whole ‘I’m a good parent because I’m here watching my kid’ thing and still get out of here early!” Win-win!!
Well turns out the little boogers were pretty good and I ended up sticking around because, well let’s face it, we don’t get a lot of entertainment in Yreka and this was pretty fun!
So 5th grade band played - ‘Mary had a Little Lamb’, ‘Hot Cross Buns’, ‘Jingle Bells’………. a little squeaky, but cute!
7th & 8th grade choir were really good and I must say their little piano accompanist, Eleanor Collier, was darling and the highlight of the show!
6th grade band - played a little bit better than the 5th grade band (duh!)
7th and 8th grade band - played and they were pretty darn good!
Then, on stage came the 6th grade choir. The two most awkward stages in life are at 95 (if you make it that long) and 12!! Oh my, do you remember 12? Puberty blossoming, or more like battling that cute kid that once existed - like Alien trying to escape its host! Yikes! Bless their little hearts! It all would have been fine if they’d condensed their program to about 5-10 minutes (remember, snow accumulating…), but after a half hour of bad scripted dialog, that these kids probably spent a gazillion hours memorizing, and a song about every cultural December holiday in existence (Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa, Luminaries for Hispanic Christmas?? (I’ve never even heard of that one), AND Santa Claus - we are so politically correct, no? I was secretly hoping for some mild, anomalous condition that might render me unconscious so that the torture would stop! After each bit of scripted dialog they would go into another song and I could hear the murmuring in the audience, “… not another one!!”
I know the kids worked really hard, did a great job and should be really proud of their performance, BUT it was just too long.
The best part of the evening for me was the kid sitting down the row from me on the bleachers. He leaned over and was completely shocked by a black checker that just fell out of his shirt. I overheard him telling his buddy that he didn’t even know it was there! How do you not know there’s a checker in your shirt?! It rolled across the floor slowly, perfectly, with such grace and purpose right through the band chairs and landed in the middle of the clarinet section. You should have seen the look on his face! I was cracking up!! So funny!!! (it’s the little things, ehhh?)
PS - I’ve learned to embrace that parental adage, “choose your battles”. The choice of summer dress and sandals in the middle of a snow storm simply wasn’t a battle I was willing to fight - trust me, she learned her lesson! She says to me, after we’ve crossed the school yard, road and parking lot in about 3 inches of fresh snow, “Mom, I’m such a ‘Bob’ for wearing sandals!” Ya think!? I don’t know what a ‘Bob’ is, but I like it and it is now commonly used term in our house for someone who does something that’s “not really sensible:)”
Don’t be a ‘Bob’! Have a Merry Christmas!
