Never Too Young For Cultcha

I took my five-and-half-year-olds to see Shakespeare yesterday. 

It was family-friendly Shakespeare -- THE TAMING OF THE SHREW trimmed to about an hour's length, performed outdoors under the trees, with rock n' roll, acrobatics, and juggling interspersed; characters with mohawks and dyed pink hair; entrances and exits made on skateboards and bicycles built for two.  But it was still Shakespeare:  the dialogue, monologues, characters, story, all his, and pretty much intact despite the cuts.  (Thank you, Actors' Gang, who've dubbed this particular production of their annual Shakespeare for Families series "Katie the Curst.")

It was a small deposit in the kids' "cultcha" bank account ("cultcha" is what my Brooklyn-born, Manhattan dwelling parents thrived on).

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Everything's Still Beautiful At The Ballet

Nothing like seeing your precious little ballerina in a group of three-to-five-year-olds prancing around a stage in white tutus and bunny ears to make you gush.  My daughter appeared this afternoon in her dance school's annual end-of-the-year production, her very first real performance.  This year's production was entitled BEYOND WONDERLAND.

There were plenty of students on stage at this production who'd studied ballet, jazz, tap and modern for years.  And they did some amazing work.

But I was all eyes on the wee ones, the ones who, like my daughter, take 40 minutes of dance class once a week.  I expected to be at least a wee bit emotional when my kid took the stage.  But the funny thing is, my eyes started watering the first time some of the smaller kids took the stage, long before my own kid's group.

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The Great "Faery" Hunt

Okay, it was blisteringly hot today, and wild fires were raging.

Nevertheless, it was the summer's last scheduled show in Griffith Park of A FAERY HUNT (before it moves to venues a bit farther afield), so I drove clear across L.A. and up through Koreatown, into Los Feliz, and finally to Fern Dell, to take Thing 1 and Thing 2 to look for fairies.

Thing 2 insisted on going in costume, but that was no problem, thanks to a hand-me-down fairy outfit (thank you, Julia -- a going-into-third-grade, big girl friend who keeps Thing 2 in wonderful outfits). Thing 2 kept telling her brother the faery hunt was for girls, despite my continual attempts to dispel this notion. (Sure enough, there were boys in attendance, though Thing 2 later pointed out, "it was MOSTLY girls").

The "hunt" was really an interactive play with several stops along the way, guided by actors and actresses and even kid actors, in fairy and troll attire, and a couple of fairy "guides." The play had a plot of sorts, just enough for my kids to kinda/sorta follow (they were so busy looking at the costumes and face paint on the actors, they missed a few plot beats). And the actors were sufficiently convincing to the kids that Thing 2 asked me if the fairies lived in the park, though later she asked, "Were they real fairies, or dress-up fairies?"

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