Stella was not looking forward to the theater camp performance. "It's going to be terrible," she told me. "The dance is so dumb." As the week progressed she became less emphatic about it, but...just between you and me and the internet, her initial skepticism was warranted. I cannot be the only person who winces at an announcement that we're about to listen to the Good Attitude Rap.
All the parents had signed consents allowing the director to put a video of this performance on YouTube. I thought this would diminish the number of parents recording on their phones, but I was completely wrong. Oh, person in front of me, if you hold your phone above your head and move it from side to side to side, it's hard for me to see the little girl I came to watch -- the one who is hoping to make eye contact with me.
Midway through I noticed a woman in the front row who was videorecording the performance. Behind her, a woman was trying to videorecord the performance, but half of the image on her phone's screen was filled with the shoulder/arm/phone of the woman in front of her.
I thought to myself, "If I were not constitutionally opposed to the idea, I could take out my phone and fill the screen three-quarters of the way with images of those other women, while the person behind me filled his screen seven-eights of the way with images of the three of us, and the person behind him filled her screen fifteen-sixteenths of the way with the whole gang of us. And then the ghost of Zeno would descend and say, 'Ha! You'll never make it out of here!'"
Thankfully, I escaped to tell the tale.
Recent Comments