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“Let go of what you think your child should be interested in and what you think they should be doing or learning.” ~ Kate Fairlie in “Let Go and Let Them Learn” on Childhood101

And other wonderful playful food for thought from around the web:

“Toddlers to tweens: relearning how to play”  by Stephanie Hanes, The Christian Science Monitor online

“Kids need adventure. Parents need to to teach them how” by Stuart on The Family Adventure Project

“Why Children’s Theater Matters” by Danielle Wood on education.com

“This is What Happens When You Give Thousands of Stickers to Thousands of Kids” on Colossal Art & Design

LP and I just came home from a whirlwind trip to Boston for a family event.  We had 5 fun and family-packed days.  One of the many delights for us was 2 nights in a hotel (oh the pool!) which meant more hangout time with cousins (and for me with my siblings).

The second night, my 7-year-old niece and LP were at loose ends, so we three girls went to our room to make some puppets.  Those of you who have read my blog for awhile know that I don’t leave home without blue painters tape and you can see how useful it was for this make-it-up craft.

We took turns drawing faces (mostly dogs, of course) and then carefully ripped them out and taped them onto construction paper tubes (another travel essential).  The tubes were various sizes and fit either over a few fingers or a whole hand depending on the size of the puppeteers hands.  LP also asked for a bone puppet for the dogs so I made that one for her.  It was fun to have time with my crafty niece and experience her creativity in action (I love that one of her dog puppets “Woof” has his name written on his forehead).

Much to LP’s disappointment, there wasn’t time to gather all the cousins together for a puppet show before bedtime.  However, the puppets packed up easily for the next leg of our journey and when we were finished playing, they were recycled.

My good friend, Wendy, and her family have a tradition of doing something different to mark every night of Chanukah. From family craft projects to volunteering to having  a party to baking banana bread and distributing it to the homeless to learning something new as a family (like rock climbing), I love the idea of making every night (or day) special AND creating traditions that aren’t about presents or about trying to make Chanukah into Christmas.

Every year, I ask Wendy for the list of what they do, but this and that happens and I haven’t acted on it until this year.  I know that we’ll develop what we do as time goes by  and LP grows.  I love the sense of anticipation that happens around traditions…I’m already looking forward to next year’s lantern walk.

In thinking about what traditions I want to create for our family, I’ve focused on the theme of light…both literal (candles), cosmic (star watching) and metaphoric through our actions (giving to others).

This year we are:

*having a family Chanukah party on the first night with latkes, playing music and a few presents

*craft & cooking projects on the second night (soft dreidl decorated with fabric markers and a dreidl cake of LP’s own recipe)

*lantern walk around the neighborhood on the third night (we made the lanterns by gluing tissue paper on glass jars and putting tea lights in them, specific instructions here at SteadyMom)

*Shabbat, dreidl playing, singing  and a few presents on the fourth night

*star watching picnic on the fifth night

*Making gifts for others on the sixth night (not sure what we’ll be making yet)

*put on a show together on the seventh night (and hopefully visiting a nursing home during the day)

*more music making and a few more presents on the eighth night

It is important to me that LP be able to enjoy Chanukah, have traditions to share with friends and also be able to share her friends’ Christmas traditions without envy. My parents gave me that gift growing up. I always loved Chanukah and how we celebrated AND it was comfortable and fun sharing in my friends’ Christmas traditions. We are living that sharing tradition this year as we had our annual Chanukah open house (pre-Chanukah this year because of the timing) and will attend a Christmas party on Christmas day.

Happy Holidays everyone!  May you spend these days sharing light with those you love!

The past month has been one of improvised baking and concocting.  I’ll be writing a couple of posts about engaging and supporting a little person’s interest, so consider this one a teaser.

Below is the recipe for a “Show” ~ the first concoction that LP created about a month ago.  She made it while I was making dinner (homemade pizza) so most of the ingredients are what I was using (except for the goldfish!).

LP’s recipe (as dictated by the girl):

Start with a lot of goldfish.

Add just two whole mushrooms and a lot oil and a lot of wheat germ becasue the oil and the wheat germ taste good and they’ll make it taste good.

Add lots of garlic, cutted garlic.

The cheese makes the Show taste a little like popcorn.

Add pizza dough and pineapple.

Flour’s the last ingredient. It makes the show taste powdery.

Some shows get spinach in them.

Bake for very long. The long should be 20 minutes.

We eat the show when it comes out of the oven. It’s a cheer you up show!

(The recipe was dictated to me over dinner. As you can see, there are a few ingredients – pasta, celery, olives) that didn’t make it into the formal recipe.  And yes….she did eat some of it!)

One of LP’s regular companion’s  is Doggy Chicken Burrito (and yes, you do need to say the whole name).

Doggy Chicken Burrito is interested in bugs that sting, especially bees.

Doggy Chicken Burrito knows that he needs protection to investigate bees and not get hurt.

Doggy Chicken Burrito wearing protective gear looks like this:

 

Big people almost universally comment about Doggy Chicken Burrito by saying, “What happened to your doggie?” or “What’s wrong with his eyes?”  or “Oh now! Your doggie has an owie!”  or “Why can’t your doggie see?” LP  usually attempts to explain, although her explanation is a little hard to follow if you don’t already know who Doggy Chicken Burrito is and about his interests in bees.

Last night, LP asked me, “Why does everyone think there’s something wrong with Doggy Chicken Burrito? Why don’t they know he can see through the protection?”

A hard question to answer.

Sure, one answer is that when you use your wonderful imagination, not everyone can see what something means unless you draw them into your world.  But another answer is we live in  a culture of fear that leads people to unconsciously make negative assumptions and while it is frustrating to explain and explain, you are doing a good thing — challenging those assumptions — when you do.

Would I make that same mistake if I didn’t know Doggy Chicken Burrito’s back story?  Very likely.  As much as I try to embrace free range parenting (see Free Range Kids for an abundance more on that topic), I am as saturated in the culture of fear as anyone.

While it is certainly easy to tell myself to stop overthinking this, I do believe it is meaningful that EVERY time someone has engaged LP about Doggy Chicken Burrito’s eye covering, it has been with the assumption that something is wrong. I wish even one person engaged her with curiosity and without assumption — “Tell me about your doggie’s eyes” would be one way to do it.

And such a good reminder to me about asking kids open-ended questions, especially when it comes to the place where our adult reality and their wonderful imaginations meet.  What we “see” may not be what is real.

Oh, I have about twenty posts to write about LP’s life as a dog.

But for now, I think her song captures some of the essence. Picture LP industriously using blue painters tape all over the dining room built-in cabinet and walls to create her bookstore as she sings:

Oh, I wanna be a bookstore dog.

Oh, I’m making a bookstore.

Now I’m letting everyone know,

This is a surprise.

I’m not adopted yet.

I’m not adopted yet.

I’m being adopted.

I’m being taken care of.

I’m gonna be a bookstore dog, a bookstore dog.

I let the world know, this is my house.

Yup. That’s pretty much the song a bookstore dog would sing.

I’ve been taking (an unexpected) blogging break AND also been bookmarking lots of wonderful links out there. So I thought it was time to share a few. The first one is a wonderful 5 minute video…check it out!

“How to make an interactive and experiential story-telling hour” on Kirjastokaista

Play, Who Will be the Next Steve Jobs?” by Darell Hammond on Huffington Post

“German doctors prescribe kids a trip to the theater” by Isabelle de Pommereau on The Christian Science Monitor Global News Blog

“Blast Off! Pretend Play Astronaut” by Melissa Taylor on Imagination Soup

“Quiet-time art game for children” by Jean Van’t Hul on The Artful Parent

I've been wanting to do a quick run-down of my take-aways from directing and performing in Fear. I can't believe it closed only a week ago. The problem with a one-week run is that your so focused on the show opening, then suddenly it's closing you're on your way to your last show and you need to pick up gifts for your production team so they get random things you could find at Andronicos.

Then suddenly it's over.

What did I learn?

For a directing standpoint, I learned that it really doesn't matter who you kill off when. I used to think it did. I used to think you needed to find the protagonist early on so you could folllow their story and make sure they stayed alive so you don't end up telling a bad sci-fi horror movie plot that ends with the wrong character still alive.

Then I realized in a modern horror-story, especially an improvised one, you don't need to worry about that at all. In the post-Scream self-aware horror-story landscape, every convention has been turned on its head and broken for effect. Hell, you  can even trace that back to Psycho, where Alfred Hitchcock had the audacity to kill off his biggest star right at the beginning of the move. Horror stories are all about playing with expectations. If you set someone up as the hero and then you kill them off, clearly you did that on purpose for effect. If they live to the end, you must have done that on purpose too.

In improv you have the ability to adjust on the fly. If the person you all thought was the protagonist gets killed, then you're telling a different story, and you start telling that new story. In the first show, I kept Susan's character alive when she clearly wanted to be killed because, in my mind, she made it to the end of the story. Had that happened a couple shows later, I would have just killed her and saw what happened.

By the end of the run, we'd played this out to the extreme wherein the killer actually wins. The last two shows had the evil element triumph at the end of the show. Sometimes that's just the way it goes. You have to let the story be what it wants be, but I don't think we could have let the killer win until we let go the idea that certain people had to live to certain points in the show. Or maybe I just needed to let that go, but either way, we got there.

The other big lesson I took away was to communicate. In improv, you always have to walk a fine line between over-communicating your hits and not communicating them well enough at all, but there's other levels of communication as well. Twice I found myself onstage about to kill someone in a certain way and I realized I had no way to accomplish it safely with out communicating what I wanted to do to my fellow improvisor. But I had no way to do that silently. So, in both case, and in both cases it was with Merrill, I simply told her under by breath on stage what I was about to do. "I'm going to stab you in the ear." "I'm going to trip you over backwards." She knew what was going to happen and could accomplish it safely, and I'm sure no one in the audience heard or saw. There's no reason not to communicate on stage, if you can do it properly.

Then there's communicating backstage. You have a hit. What's the bare minimum of information you need to communicate to someone to put them on the same page as you? I knew I needed to do a scene with Larissa's character, but as the killer, if I just grabbed her and brought her onstage for a scene, it's reasonable to assume she'll assume I intend to kill her. That's not what I wanted. So I told her "I want to do a scene with you. But I don't want to kill you." That gave her what she needed and we could a scene on the same page. It took two sentences. I didn't detail what I wanted to happen in the scene. That was all I needed to say.

Those are the things that stuck in my mind. The cast was kick-ass. Everyone did a great job of playing intense emotions and killing each other with panache. I loved it.

Here are show summaries for the entire run, including slightly edited versions of the three I posted previously.

We've had three performances of Fear, which puts us a little less then halfway through the run. In a normal run, three performances would have taken us through the first weekend.  The shows went very well, if I do say so myself! Here's a look at the briefest of brief show summaries for each:

Once upon a time, our hero was in an Improv show. In this show, a call went forth from the audience for "Molière" as a style for a scene. Not knowing Molière from a hole in the ground, our hero was want to not participate directly in the scene, but as no one else dove onto stage in the blackness, he did what any brave Improviser would do and said "Tell me something about Molière." The sentence he got in reply was "Rhyming couplets." So, armed with this knowledge, he dove onto stage and proceeded to do a scene (into which someone else eventually entered) that made the audience laugh even though it was more Seussian than Molière.

The problem occurs post show, when the audience was departing the theater and thanking the cast, and being thanked by the cast. Our hero's post show glow was shattered by someone saying quite bluntly that the "Molière scene" was totally wrong. Completely, totally wrong. The inadvertent tongue lashing made our hero feel pretty dumb... and while he's by no means a rocket scientist (gave that up for performing), he's not dumb. But feeling that way is a sure fire way to get him to clam up and get super-duper pissy.

Since then, however, whenever specific genres or authors are dictated for a scene, the ghost of "Completely, totally wrong" comes back and causes a total brain lockup. The cerebral cortex filter kicks into afterburner overdrive and completely shuts down all communication to the cerebellum, rendering our hero about as Improv savvy as over-buttered toast. Which is why, at tonight's rehearsal, what started out as a swimmingly fun night quickly came to a screeching over-buttered toast halt. Our hero felt dumb, and once that happens, it's all down hill.

me
L'Imposteur

Back in December, I went to visit the California Academy of Sciences with Lisa and Kathryn. It was a great day. I dropped the money to become a member of the Academy (that makes TWO Academys I'm a member of!) so I could go back as often as I wanted to (and bring a friend each time).

So when Un-Scripted got invited to perform at the Academy's first Nightlife event of 2010, I was crazy excited.

Tonight, we reported to the Academy after closing for a sound check, and a private tour of the facility to inspire us for tomorrow's show. I honestly can't even begin to tell you just how cool it was to be (mostly) alone in a huge, empty, Natural History & Science museum. Cat, our guide, was fantastic, and even took us behind the scenes to peek at the research library and the Docent's room, where we got to play with skulls and animal pelts that may or may not show up in tomorrow's shows.



Hopefully they'll like us enough to have us back every couple months, because seriously... the only time I ever use my Science Degree from Penn State is during Improv shows, it seems. :)

me
Science! It works, Bitches!

I remember the first time I saw Improv done really well. It was the first show I saw at the Improv Asylum, just over 10 years ago. I had been taking classes there, but hadn't been to a show, so I finally went to watch my Level 1 instructor, Amy Roeder, do her thing.

I can't even explain how dumbstruck I was. But I knew, at that moment, with every fiber of my being, that this is what I had to do.

To this day, when I see amazing Improv, it inspires me and lifts my heart. Seriously, it feels like someone puts their hand underneath my heart and lifts upwards. Sometimes so much so that it hurts.

One of the reasons I enjoy working with Un-Scripted so much is that I see shit that does that to me on a regular basis... and sometimes I get to be right in the middle of it.

Each member of the cast tonight was given a slip of paper with two "Secret Notes" on it. The were things that the Director and AD wanted to see us work on. My two secret notes were "Play a character who overreacts to things." And "Play a character with a distinct body language/physical tick."

In one of the scenes I did, I went in totally over the top, reacting to something that had happened in the scene prior (which I wasn't a part of), and in that split second before I went on stage, someone said something that completely turned my take on what I was about to do around. Like, a complete 180. But I just ran with it, overreacted my little heart out, and stormed off.

The next scene found me on stage, continuing my overreaction as the same character, drunk on a stoop. Angry drunk. Unpleasant drunk. And Trish Tillman came out in her Sultry Seducer mode and brought the anger overreaction around so the character was sobbing against her chest while she started a song. And then we danced.

Now, I've danced for a long time. Beneath my Micheline Man exterior is the body of a dancer, and sometimes he can fight his way through the beer coozy around my six pack just enough to shine. And boy did he do that tonight. Trish and I sang and danced this sort of Tango-esque number that just... well, it felt right. I let go and just did whatever the moment called for, and it was sexy and tense and just umph-tastic. And when it was over, I noticed my heart was being shoved up into my upper chest.

Then, towards the end of rehearsal, we worked on Improvised Dance. Just dance, no singing. We went through a couple iterations, then this number started and the suggestion we got was simple "There are two groups." Of course, it started out 3 and 3, doing their own thing. Then some mimicry started, and the it became 2 and 4, and then 5 and Keck. And Keck became the one that was always one beat behind the others. So as soon as he would join us in whatever we were doing, we would move on to the next thing. It became this amazing, and heart wrenching game, until Dave decided to stick with him. At which point, without even looking at each other, we all bolted back across the stage to join them for the end of the peace. It was cute and sad, and again, one of those Improv moments that you wish you could find in every show.

Damn, I love this gig.

me
Surrounded by Inspiration

It's that time... the holidays are upon us. Bloomingdale's has had Christmas trees up since Memorial Day, pretty much. The lights are on the palm trees in Union Square. And the performance schedule for Let It Snow! is out.

The show previews next week, then runs through 12/19. Here are the dates I'm performing:

11/20 (preview)
12/5 (matinee)
12/5 (evening)
12/11 (evening)
12/12 (matinee)
12/18 (evening)
12/19 (evening)

Matinee' shows generally start at 3:00, and evening shows at 8:00.

For those who don't know (or don't remember) Let It Snow is the family friendly fully improvised Holiday musical where we take an audience member's small home town and do a two hour holiday musical tribute to it.

You can find more information about the show at: http://un-scripted.com

And Alan made this BITCHIN interactive Google map, listing the show summary from every town that we've featured during the course of the last several years doing Let It Snow! http://un-scripted.com/content/let-it-snow-interactive-map

me
Missing the snow in Boston a little... :)