Shenanigans 2: This Time It's Personal

A couple I was helping earlier had two little ones, three and six, who were behaving in a rather saintly fashion for the average bored kid I see. I tried to engage them with remotes and things while their parents talked.

Eventually they were restless enough that I pulled out notepads and asked if they wanted to draw. The three year old quickly lost interest and I went over to ask her favorite animal. She told me “elephant” so to delight and amaze her I started drawing an elephant. Usually kids are into it.

When I was done she pronounced, “It looks like a giraffe.”

I staggered back melodramatically but actually laughing hysterically and said, “There goes my art degree!”

The parents laughed and said kids were harsh critics. When they checked out they saw my elephant doodle on the desk and both did a double take like, “Woah, that’s a really good elephant!”

I used to go to this small drama camp as a kid that was entirely run by one nice lady, I believe named Carol. We would put on abridged minimalist versions of popular musicals at a local church with only one week of rehearsal. These weren’t licensable junior versions. Carol created them herself.

She wrote the scripts to include the major plot highlights and famous lines from the various musicals and she arranged and accompanied all of the songs on the piano herself. We did Annie, Mary Poppins, the Wizard of Oz, and, the year before I came, Peter Pan. These shows were definitely illegal, but they were so small that nobody really noticed, and they were a ton of fun. The camp was also extremely affordable, so nobody was getting rich off of it.

But Cinderella, my final production with them, was next-level. When I arrived for the first day of camp, I was curious to see if it would be the Disney version or the Rodgers and Hammerstein version.

It was both. And neither.

Carol somehow wrote an almost entirely original book for Cinderella that used the best songs from both the Disney and R&H versions. That meant that I, as a stepsister, got to sing the “Stepsisters’ Lament,” a peak song if you ask me, but adorable little kids playing mice also got to sing “Cinderelly, Cinderelly.”

The one thing about combining both versions is perhaps an overemphasis on the Fairy Godmother, because the songs “Bibbidy Bobbity Boo” and “Impossible” are both no-brainers to include. But somehow, things worked out perfectly there, too, by splitting the role.

See, we didn’t just have a Fairy Godmother.

We also had a Fairy Godfather.