Today was the final day of our two week camp in Bergamo and therefore the day of my kids' infamous "Captain Rihanna Potter and the Twilight Hulk" skit. So we're group six of seven, which is okay, considering that we're one of the two purple book classes (the older classes). However, due to lack of proper scheduling on behalf of the earlier groups, neither Sebastian nor I had a final dress rehearsal run through. No big deal right? My kids were pretty phenomenal in our private rehearsals. WRONG.
It comes to our turn and the introductions are perfect. However, then the girl, who has the opening line, gets stage fright and freezes. She is panicking. SO I try feeding her the line from the side of the stage to no avail. After a while, I walk out on stage give her a hug and hand her the script. However, at this point, she's so embarrassed she starts crying. BALLS. Now I'm sweating. I have a crying child, a play that stalled from the literal outset, and a room full of restless parents starting to build a low rumble of grumbling. Finally, her angst having left, she delivered the first line and the show went on. My kids missed some lines, but it was passable and--more importantly--over.
Then Sebastian's group goes on. His play starts with a 2 minute dance to Poker Face, but he can't get his computer to play. So we remove the outdated audio jack from his PC and put in mine. Neither will work. Why do you ask? As it turns out, the 95 year old audio jack fractured inside both his AND my computer--we both have parts of it lodged in our headphone ports--meaning our computers cannot play sound until we find an Apple store. SHIT. Moreover, the only way to use the sound system is now broken. GODDAMNIT. After a twenty minute delay for technical difficulties, we finally gave up and played the audio between his blackberry and me banging on a water-logged piano in the corner.
The show ran over so long due to our two catastrophes that parents and children began to leave without certificates. That's even including that we didn't sing the group song so we could speed things up. A clusterf**k of portfolios, diplomas, and awkward little-big person hugs ensued.
I think tonight I'm going to relax after the ACLE dinner and play drink the beer with Seb. We'll probably try to break the high score hahahaha--not really--but seriously that thing's about to be shattered.
