Idyll Banter (9 page)

THE
SCHOOL—
PLAYGROUNDS
AND
CLASSROOMS

DRAMA LIVES IN PRESCHOOL
OZ ODYSSEY

NEITHER BETHANY BARNER
nor Victoria Brown is the sort of actress who enjoys discussing her craft. But as they await the curtain for the first performance of their new show, the dramatic difference in their approaches becomes clear.

Four-year-old Victoria is a study in silent concentration. In the last seconds before she will walk onto the redwood deck that today is a stage, the only time she moves is when she methodically checks her props one last time.

Wicker basket? Got it. Red sneakers that will serve today as my ruby slippers? Yup, still on my feet. Those ribbons that Mom put in my pigtails? Phew, still there.

Five-year-old Bethany, on the other hand, is already deeply immersed in her role. She has become one with the little dog she will bring to life. She falls to her hands and knees and barks with great enthusiasm.

“That's what I'm going to say to the Wicked Witch,” she explains to the audience members as they take their seats on blankets in the grass.

Certainly there are drama critics who fear for the future of the living theater, but I'm not among them.

After all, I'm not a drama critic.

Nevertheless, these days I still find myself waxing poetic and growing downright ebullient when I contemplate the future of the live stage play. Recently I saw that future in the form of the Lincoln Cooperative Preschool's performance of
The Wizard of Oz,
and I was reassured that today's young crop of actors and actresses brings a passion to their craft that will keep the theater vibrant and alive for a long time.

Among the new faces to look for at, perhaps, the Royall Tyler Theatre in the year 2010:

First there is five-year-old Steven Patterson. With tremendous sensitivity, Steven brought the deeply conflicted Scarecrow to life, especially in those moments when he was suddenly surrounded by five of the seven little girls who thought it was their turn to be Dorothy.

Likewise, Bridgette Bartlett, four, demonstrated the sort of honesty in her performance in which the fine line between the world and the stage all but disappears. “I think I want to give my mommy a kiss,” she said soon after meeting the Tin Man, at which point she simply walked off the stage and into her mother's lap and did just that.

Three-year-old Cameron Skerritt Perta brought immense energy to the role of Flying Monkey (on and off the stage), and Alexandra Ackert-Smith (still a few weeks short of three), conveyed with elegance the despair of the witch as she melted.

Ackert-Smith also made an excellent scary face on command.

Viscaya Du Mond Wagner and Emily Wood were both equally reassuring good witches from the north, and worked well as a tag-team sort of Glinda.

Of course, the performance needed multiple Glindas because there were so many different Dorothys. At one point, Viscaya and Emily were outnumbered four to two, and the witches had to work pretty darn fast to get all four girls back to Kansas.

As an added bonus, the show was preceded by a rousing rendition of “I Am a Pizza” in both English and French, an appropriate opening number given the pizza's wistful, Dorothy-like plea at the end of the song: “I am a pizza, please take me home.”

Directed by outgoing preschool teacher Nancy Stevens, this version of
Oz
was particularly rich in improvisational flair. Sometimes a good witch just needs her mom, and that's A-OK, and sometimes the Munchkins will be more difficult to herd than a litter of kittens.

And that's OK, too. Because Oz is a pretty magical place to begin with, and it can only become more enchanting when peopled by actors little more than three feet tall.

IT'S NOT EASY TO BE A KID

LAST MONTH I
had the pleasure of serving as the company for an “unaccompanied minor” on a flight from Portland, Oregon, to Chicago. The minor was a ten-year-old boy on his way to catch up with his mom in Florida during his spring break from school, and we became pals soon after the flight attendant—a woman who had had her smile surgically removed at birth—pointed out his seat to him and commanded, “Read the safety card before we take off.”

We bonded because I was willing to explain to him why Billy Bob Thornton was trying to blackmail Frances McDormand's boss in
The Man Who Wasn't There,
and he was willing to teach me how to draw the Pokémon character Pikachu.

At first he had been mildly annoyed that the flight was showing a movie for grown-ups instead of one for children, but when I pointed out to him that he was the only child on the entire airplane, he saw the reasonableness of the airline's decision to show a black-and-white Coen brothers film over
Jimmy Neutron.

Personally, I would have been content to watch
Jimmy Neutron,
too, but then I will watch anything while inside an airplane. I'd watch a two-hour infomercial about nose hair trimmers if it took my mind off the fact that I was hurtling through space at 500 mph, and there was nothing between me and the earth but 35,000 feet of air.

In any case, I liked this young man a lot, especially because he understood the cardinal rules of flying in the modern age: Wear sneakers and travel with lots of snacks. In his knapsack he had pretzels covered in chocolate and pretzels covered in yogurt, Tootsie Rolls, Chex Party Mix, juice boxes, and three Twinkies. He was also willing to share his cache with me, even though I could offer nothing in return but a couple of Altoids and the antibacterial hand gel with which we could wash our hands when we were done.

Incidentally, the sneakers matter because there seems to be a dramatically decreased likelihood that you will have to take your shoes off at security if you are wearing a pair of Converse low-tops (my traveling sneaker of choice) than if you are wearing black leather wing tips. There is nothing worse than being caught with your shoes off when it is announced that your flight has been canceled and you need to return to the counter to book a new one.

The boy had spiked his hair with gobs of gel so that it looked like Needles National Park, and he had brought with him a series of toy skateboards the size of disposable razors. We spent a few minutes on the flight rolling the skateboards back and forth on his tray table and he showed me how to make them flip. This gave us both enormous satisfaction because the gentleman in the seat before him had insisted on putting his seat back so that the headrest was practically in the boy's lap, and every time we flipped a skateboard we jostled the guy's seat. (We had politely asked this fellow to put his seat forward, but he said he liked to recline and suggested that the boy move to any of the empty seats on the plane if it disturbed him to have a view of a strange man's balding scalp.)

In Chicago I changed planes, but the boy was going to remain on board because the flight continued on to Tampa, his eventual destination. When we were parting I wished him well and he said—seemingly out of the blue—that he hadn't seen his real father in almost two years.

I nodded and wondered suddenly who had put him on the plane in Portland. Then I gave him my card.

Sometimes, it's very hard to be a kid.

THE THRILL, THE STRESS, THE JOY
OF THE RACE

IN A SHORT RACE,
a thousandth of a second can make all the difference: the difference between a fleeting but precious moment inside the winner's circle, and a lifetime outside it, wondering . . . What if?

And so, despite the fact that his first race is only minutes away, Steve Schubart decides his vehicle needs more weight. With a borrowed steel washer, Scotch tape, and a little faith, he and his race-day mechanic bring the car up to 140.7 grams—still a legal machine, but a weighty one.

I ask him if the track looks fast this brisk March afternoon, but Schubart's a veteran. “It's the car that counts,” he says simply.

A moment later, Schubart and his machine—a worker bee of a race car, an earth-tone, pine-colored rocket with more heart than hieroglyphics—are behind the starting peg.

And then the races begin. In a series of head-to-head contests, Schubart's car sizzles down the short course, dueling racers known throughout the circuit for speed. Guys like Mike Truchon, this year behind a dark red machine with lightning bolts on the hood so vivid you can sense the way the car will explode down the track. Or Brian Mayo, whose silver racer looks so powerful one spectator in the crowd murmurs approvingly, “Give that thing enough fuel and I'll bet it goes into orbit.”

Schubart will never know if the washer—a flat piece of metal roughly the size of a city subway token—made the difference. The races were close, two with Mayo so tight that not even the video cameras and stopwatches surrounding the finish line could determine a winner.

But, in the end, Steve Schubart's gritty car squeaked out a few key victories, and he took first place in the Webelo Den, and third place overall in Lincoln Cub Scout Pack 633's Pinewood Derby.

The March 23 race, held in Lincoln's Burnham Hall, is a warm-up of sorts for the Cub Scout District's annual Pinewood Derby in Middlebury on April 27. But just as the Olympic trials for many athletes can mean as much as one moment in time in Athens, Greece, or a year in the minors can mean as much as a week in what's called the Major League Show, last Saturday's Lincoln Derby was an emotional competition.

Sportsmanship always won out over standings, but that doesn't mean the races weren't tense.

The Cub Scouts, all six- to ten-year-olds, had taken identical blocks of nondescript pine and identical plastic wheels, and—perhaps with a little help from Mom or Dad—built their own deeply personal, highly idiosyncratic cars. Of the fifteen racing machines that graced the starting pegs, no two looked as if they were from the same automotive genus or species, or inspired by the same issue of
Cub Scout Car and Driver.
My personal favorite? Six-year-old Bryn Paul made the conscious decision to sacrifice aerodynamics for accuracy, and gave his car a Play-Doh and pipe-cleaner driver.

And each boy brought to the Derby the hope that his car would speed over the thirty-two-foot maple track first and electrify the Burnham Hall crowd. “I love the Derby,” says Don Gale, whose son Schuyler is a part of the Pack's Wolf Den. “It's Thunder Road without the noise.”

But each also brought a tremendous sense of camaraderie, the sort of friendship in which fairness mattered more than who finally won.

In the Schubart/Mayo face-offs for the Webelo blue ribbon—two so close that a third was needed to determine the winner—it wasn't one of the adult judges who finally awarded the victory to Steve Schubart.

It was Brian Mayo. Even in that third race, Mayo's and Schubart's cars seemed to cross the finish line simultaneously, and the judges were about to insist on a fourth race. But with a voice as filled with enthusiasm as when he'd first entered the hall with his car and his hopes, Mayo called out the words that symbolized the spirit of the Derby:

“Good race! Steve won!”