How Anne-with-an-e's Confirmation Led Me to Buy Zoo Pals

Anne's Confirmation deserves its own post -- hopefully said post will be something beautiful and poignant and worthy of the sacrament.

This is not that post.

Today's post concerns the fact that I am co-directing a little youth choir musical about Noah's Ark.

By "co-directing" I mean that I:

• Wave my arms around a lot
• Clap and encourage children
• Tell them they are "Awesome!"
• Frown at the music director for being too nice to the children when they are behaving un-awesomely
  
• Plead for more rehearsals
• Pretend that I am Stanislavsky, throw myself on the couch and wail to my family, "I can't work with these people!"
• Remind myself that "these people" -- many of them, anyway -- are third graders
• Readjust my expectations
• Despair of ever figuring out how to quickly, very cheaply, create "animal hats" for twenty children
• Complain to our company, over Anne-with-an-e's Confirmation weekend, that I will never figure out the animal stuff before our performance which is scheduled to happen in about three seconds (okay, a week, but it feels like three seconds)
• Hear an epiphanic, orchestral piece and angels singing when one of our guests -- 14-year-old Anna -- says, "Why don't you just use those animal paper plates?"
• Purchase Zoo Pals and these things and get to work, after experimenting with various constructions on Betsy and Ramona's heads (and in between sticky bouts of covering Noah's Ark with contact paper, which, of course, Anne-with-an-e and I ran out of, because one roll of that stuff is never enough for anything, and coming up with a filmy set of dove wings, an olive branch and the trunk of a palm tree)
• Look at my day's work
• Think of Anna and sigh happily
  
• Have a glass of wine
• Go to bed

Because, y'know, I'm gonna need a little sleep before that performance rolls around in three seconds.

And that is the story of how Confirmation Led Me to Zoo Pals, which led to the return of my sanity.

Isn't the Holy Spirit amazing?


Thanks, Anna.

(I'm not sure I can offer equal thanks to Tim, who left the Gilligan's Island dvds behind ... but I can offer equal love, which I will and I do, in spite of Gilligan. And, Betsy and Ramona will chime in with the "thanks" for those ....)