We throw it all away for art.
Last Sunday was a big day. The annual Waunakee Pancakes and Planes fly-in, which I’ve attended nearly every year since I moved here, took place in the morning. The weather was beautiful and I skipped it. The Home Talent League championship game between the Verona Cavaliers and the Middleton 29ers fell in the early afternoon. Danny is a Verona native, consummate sports fan, and he skipped it. The Packers played their season opener later in the afternoon. They beat the Lions and looked good doing it and we all (mostly) skipped it.
We skipped it all. Instead, we had brunch and watched the penultimate performance of The Little Mermaid at The Fireside Theatre in Fort Atkinson. Because, well, “three little girls,” and sometimes you have to suffer for art.
Allie and I picked the date months ago, during the Christmas season. The show was to run from July 24th through September 7th, and when you plan that far ahead, all of your weekends feel like they’re open. You choose a date like “the first Sunday in September” because you know it won’t conflict with a trip or a weekend at the lake or some other fun summertime activity. School will have started so those types of things will have largely wound down.
You don’t think about things like fly-ins and baseball championships and football openers. Those conflicts pop up later and then all you can do is lay in the bed that you made.
Motivated timing
We left Fitchburg for Fort Atkinson at about 9:45 on Sunday morning. This was a mistake.
About a week prior to the show we received an email recommending we arrive at 10:30 for brunch. Being relatively new to this, having no reason to question it, we accepted the recommendation. What we failed to do, what we should have done sometime in the preceding nine months, was to check the show time: 1:15 in the afternoon! Nearly three hours after arrival time.
Brunch doesn’t take three hours. More importantly, a seven year old girl and two five year old girls won’t tolerate anything that does take three hours. We found ourselves with a bunch of time to kill and a feeling that the early arrival time was probably designed to supply a captive clientele to the gift shops in the building.
The ruse worked, of course. We spent more than an hour shopping for souvenirs. Emmy got some Thinking Putty. Caelynn got a cuddly Nemo fish after being talked down twenty bucks from a big ticket piggy doll. Kinsley shoplifted a cute raccoon plushie. I convinced her to return and pay for it with my credit card a little later.
Food and fancy drinks
The meal was a little different from what we’ve experienced at the Fireside in the past. It was a buffet, not table service as with shows we’d seen previously. This was understandable given the large number of kids in attendance.
Confectionary appetizers and drinks were served at the table. CaeCae and Beanie got ice creamy drinks, I think, with souvenir mermaid keychains to keep their keys on. Emmy got a sophisticated drink with chocolate milk in it and an Oreo on top. She didn’t eat the Oreo. Sometimes I don’t understand Emmy.
We ate a lot because we weren’t going to have a chance to eat lunch and we had a lot of time to kill. The buffet lines moved smoothly and the food was a combination of standard breakfast stuff and standard lunch stuff. Very appropriate for a brunch! Everything was good for what it was.
Caelynn entertained us with a game of Put Your Dishes on a Napkin and Accidentally Kick and Tug and Jostle It Repeatedly So Maybe Everything Crashes to the Floor. Nothing took the plunge but it sure made all of her gyrations exciting.
The main event
We absorbed all of the slack time before the show and emerged in good spirits. There was no crying or bickering, nobody got mad. When the theater doors opened we shuffled to our seats in the second row. You’re always close to the show at the Fireside, but this time we were about as close as you can be without possibly tripping the actors.
I was curious as to how the girls would process this. It’s a story they know but it’s presented in a completely foreign way. Real people in costumes, not cartoons. Limited scenery that requires a lot of imagination. Performed right in front of and around them, not boxed into a screen at the end of the room. All in all, they handled it well. Beanie mostly looked puzzled except when she was dazzled by actors emerging from the riser in the floor. Caelynn waved at Ariel every time she walked by and decided that she will be a player (actor) when she grows up. She would really love to play a clam.
Emmy was harder to read. I didn’t notice special excitement toward any particular element of the show. Knowing who she is, I expect she most enjoyed the dancing, but her expression was neutral. It was a lot to take in.
Making wishes
I believe The Little Mermaid, the movie, was released when I was a kid. It was familiar to me but I knew nothing about the story. It was roughly what I’d have expected had I bothered to expect anything. I wasn’t there for the story.
The most noteworthy part of the experience for me didn’t come until I returned home and filtered through my photos afterward. I found a particular one, the girls throwing coins into the wishing well, that struck me.
Emmy happened to be blinking her eyes at the moment I took the photo. Somehow, to me, it injected a humanity into the picture that’ll take Emmy twenty years or longer to truly grow into. It was small, but striking.
In that frame she doesn’t just look like a kid blundering around on whatever part of the world happens to be under her feet at the moment. She looks like a human being who will live for seventy or eighty or ninety years, and maybe won’t always be satisfied with everything that she experiences.
She looks like a real person living a real life.
It’s a mirage, an apparition, an illusion created by a blinking eye. But it’s a reminder to me that she is a real person at the beginning of a real life that will have its ups and its downs. It makes me want to run ahead and grind all of the jagged little edges off of the world so they can’t hurt her, but I know that’s impossible. It’s not even desirable.
It took me forty years to learn it and to truly believe it, but life needs bad times to teach us to appreciate the good times. Emmy and Caelynn and Kinsley will learn that lesson through their own circumstances and that’s fine. If I had a coin to throw and a wishing well to throw it into, my wish would only be for them to learn it more quickly than I did.
For now we’ll put that on hold and just shoot for as many happy times as we can muster!