BY now, my wife’s policy on attending school plays (a policy that also covers pageants, talent shows, revues, recitals, and spring assemblies) is pretty well known: She believes that if your child is in a school play and you don’t go to every performance, including the special Thursday matinée for the fourth grade, the county will come and take the child. Anyone who has lived for some years in a house where that policy is strictly observed may have fleeting moments of envy toward people who have seen only one or two productions of Our Town.
One evening this spring, though, as we walked into an auditorium and were handed a program filled with the usual jokey résumés of the participants and cheerful ads from well-wishers, it occurred to me that this would be the last opportunity to see one of our children perform in a school theatrical event. That view was based partly on the fact that the child in question is twenty-six years old. She was about to graduate from law school. I was assuming that the JDs slogging through the bar-exam cram course would not decide to break the tedium with, say, a production of Anything Goes.
As I waited for the curtain to go up on the 1995 New York University Law Revue, entitled The Law Rank Redemption, I found myself thinking back on our life as parental playgoers. I realized that I couldn’t recall seeing either of our daughters in one of those classic nursery-school-pageant roles—as an angel or a rabbit or an eggplant. I thought I might be experiencing a failure of memory—another occasion for one of my daughters to say, as gently as possible, “Pop, you’re losing it”—but they have confirmed that their nursery school was undramatic, except on those occasions when a particularly flamboyant hair puller was on one of his rampages.
I do recall seeing one or the other of them as an Indian in Peter Pan and as the judge in Trial by Jury and as Nancy in Oliver! and as the narrator (unpersuasively costumed as a motorcycle tough) in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat and as a gondolier in The Gondoliers. We heard their voices in a lot of songs, even if a number of other kids were sometimes singing at the same time. We heard “Dites-moi pourquoi” sung sweetly and “Don’t Tell Mama” belted out. All in all, we had a pretty good run.
I don’t want to appear to be one of those parents who dozed through the show unless his own kid was in the spotlight. To this day, when I hear “One Singular Sensation,” from A Chorus Line, I can see Julia Greenberg’s little brother, Daniel, doing a slow, almost stately tap-dance interpretation in high-topped, quite tapless sneakers. I’m not even certain what my own girls did in the grade-school talent show at P.S. 3 which I remember mainly for the performance of the three Korn brothers. One of them worked furiously on a Rubik’s cube while his older brother accompanied him on the piano. The youngest brother, who must have been six or seven, occasionally held up signs that said something like “Two Sides to Go” or “One Side to Go.” I have always had a weakness for family acts.
I won’t pretend that all school performances were unalloyed joy. We used to go every year to watch our girls tap-dance in a recital that also included gymnastics, and the gymnastics instructor was an earnest man who seemed intent on guarding against the possibility of anyone’s getting through the evening without a thorough understanding of what goes into a simple somersault. He described each demonstration in such excruciating detail that I used to pass the time trying to imagine him helplessly tangled in his own limbs as the result of a simple somersault that had gone wrong:
“Untie me,” he is saying.
“Not until you take an oath of silence,” I reply.
Even so, I came to believe over the years that my wife’s policy on school plays, which sounds extreme, actually makes sense. It used to be that whenever young couples asked me if I had any advice about rearing children I’d say, “Try to get one that doesn’t spit up. Otherwise you’re on your own.” I finally decided, though, that it was okay to remind them that a school play was more important than anything else they might have had scheduled for that evening. I realized that school plays were invented partly to give parents an easy opportunity to demonstrate their priorities. If they can get off work for the Thursday matinée, I tell them, all the better.
1995