Our Talented Son

A few weeks ago, Zachary brought home a permission form from school to audition for the school’s talent show.  After talking about it, Zachary decided he wanted to do it, so we signed the permission form & sent it back to school.  As the audition day got closer, he started to have a little bit of cold feet, but we talked him through it, and he was ready to go.  He apparently did really well in the audition (based on the report from my mom, who was there), and then we waited to hear back on whether or not he had made it.  I’m not sure how many kids/acts auditioned, but I do know that not everyone made it.  I also know that 90 kids (61 acts) DID make it, and Zachary was one of them!  They had a dress rehearsal after school on Thursday, and then the show was Friday.

We arrived at school at 6:00 on Friday so we could get Zachary where he needed to be since he was in the first half of the show.  The show started at 6:30, and he was act #13.  We sat through a lot of singing and Indian dancing on the way to his performance.  When it was his turn, he did great!  I could tell he went blank for a brief moment, but I don’t think most people would notice it.  We’ve just seen him do this routine so many times we know what comes next.  But we were definitely VERY proud of him!  I think all of those kids deserve huge props just for having the guts to get up on stage and do it.  I’m pretty sure when I was their age that I would never have done something like that.  To show him how proud we were, we gave Zachary the DVD/Blu Ray of Hotel Transylvania.

Since this was the school's first time doing a talent show, I hope they learn a few things.  For example, 61 acts is just WAY too many.  When the show has gone on for 2 hours already, and only half of the acts have performed, you know the show is too long.  I also think they should tell the kids going in that you have a certain amount of time to perform – say, 2.5 minutes.  And that’s it.  At the end of that time, your music will be cut off, and if you don’t have music, the emcee will thank you for doing a good job.  Several acts with pre-recorded music used the entire song.  So you have acts taking 4-5 minutes, which doesn’t seem like much, but when there are 60 other acts, it adds up (note that Zachary only used 1.5 minutes!)  We left at the intermission, so I have no idea how late the show ended up going.