Thursday, May 17, 2012

Let Me Fucking Entertain You!


Ah…Nothing warms the heart more than watching your precious little DNA deposit take the stage in a school play.  And nothing empties your pockets like letting your precious reminder that the next generation better learn to read a fucking book instead of using that goddamn texting bullshit….Whoops…Lost my train of thought…Where was I?  Oh, yes.  Nothing empties your pockets like letting them sign up in the first place!  When my darling child came home, eyes wide with the thirst for the spotlight and a stack of paperwork that could provide toilet paper for a few weeks, I knew we were in for trouble.  What they should have sent home was a fat tube of KY to help ease the pain.  Because baby, we could barely sit right in the seats when the curtain went up!

Why the hell do we have to pay so much to keep our kids busy?  When the fuck did being a child mean taking out a personal loan or pissing off every single member of your family by shoving ANOTHER fucking cheesecake brochure under their noses??  I remember the days of goofing off, playing until the street lights came in and trying not to trip over the home-sewn hemline of my costume on stage.  When we went to the school to see the play, I expected to see tuxedos and limos dropping parents off from how much they asked for up front.  And that’s not before you hit the snack stand!  (They got a lot of nerve to charge 50 cents for a thing that was supposed to be a brownie, but looked like something stepped in and scraped into a pan and baked on 400 degrees for a couple of hours.  And it was about the size of postage stamp!)  When the curtain went up, late despite the BITCHING the kids received if they didn’t show up to the 1500 practices on time, we waited with baited breath to see the fruits of labor.  And I gotta say, “THOSE SICK FUCKERS FROM HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL FUCKED EVERYTHING UP!!!!”  The costumes were lovely.  The set, impressive.  The acting…well, it’s a fucking school musical, not Andrew Lloyd Webber’s latest hit.  The music…Since I had friend’s playing in the “orchestra” I’ll be nice.  It was…fitting.  The dancing?  OMFG, I’ve seen youtube videos of prisoners dancing to Thriller that had more imagination!  Basically, it was a fucking school musical! So tell me, WHAT THE FUCK DID WE PAY YOU FOR??

Sitting in the audience I was struck by a sudden thought.  “I so need to become a director for school musicals because they get paid to do shit I do for free!!”  Get kids’ attention.  Attempt to have them follow simple directions.  Get the kids’ attention.  Drill words into their heads until they are able to regurgitate something close to English language.  Get the kids’ attention.  Show them how to put one foot in front of the other without falling over and laughing like an idiot.  GET THE KID’S FUCKING ATTENTION!!!  That complete with the added bonus of being a complete control freak with a bitchy, stupid side and I’m TOTALLY ready to sign up!  Do they offer that job to someone who would actually be able to sympathize with the life of a family with no money to be tossing around?  Nope.  They give it to a bitch with a Napoleon complex.  So we get treated to little messages from our kids of her incessant demands.  She’s far too important to talk to us little people.  Unless she needs us to bend over and give a little bit more.

It would be fine if we had a say in anything, but to make matters even better, the rehearsals were closed to parents.  Not that my husband was mourning the fact that he didn’t have to watch someone teach the same box step over and over again for three hours.  But to close it off means something’s up….My kids know they have zero right to privacy and are subject to random checks for contraband or notes from teaches.  So why shouldn’t my child’s activity be open as well?  Later we found out that it’s easier to screech like a like a monkey that just zipped it’s nuts into the zipper.  She went bat shit crazy over everything.  And the final result?  A typical school musical complete with all the expected forgotten lines, broken characters, mic issues, left-right drama and injuries.  But surely, that can’t be what was envisioned all those months ago when we were given the overall deal.  Oh, wait…It should have been!  Get off your high horse lady, you ain’t in private school.  Our kids can barely read, they’re fucking like bunnies, they can’t talk in complete sentences and the only college most of them are going to features the words clown, burger, or Santa.  The parents are robbing Peter to pay Paul, struggling to keep their sanity, and lucky to not get a murder charge for fucking up one of the little bastards,

The last thing any of us needs is a chick that believes that we can shell out money for every fundraiser they have, every shirt they need, tickets (And we HAD to sell a certain number of them in advance to “qualify” for the fucking “cast” party…Don’t EVEN get me started on that!) and balloons and flowers as a cheap congratulatory gift for giving up their lives to that bitch for five months!  What we needed was to be left alone to sit back and marvel at how hard our kids worked to put on a great show.  Why?  Because it’s supposed to be fun.  It’s not a job.  It’s not a requirement to move on in life.  It’s supposed to be fun for them, entertaining for us.  So to the sour faced, uptight, petty (taking a part away from someone two weeks before opening night because you don’t feel they embraced the character properly is cruel, you cunt!), stuck-up, controlling, delusional, manipulative, untalented piece of short, twice eaten dog shit, I give your directing skills one finger up.  Feel free to guess which one. 

The ironic kicker?  My baby’s main moment came during a dance where his hood fell over his face, making it impossible to see and he didn’t miss a beat.  Even when he picked up his letter to hold up to spell out a name and didn’t realize it was upside because he DIDN’T BREAK FUCKING CHARACTER like he was taught from his father and I, veterans of the same school musical!  And at the end of the show, what did we do when our baby, who didn’t have a speaking part, came walking out for curtain calls and took a bow with the chorus?  We jumped to our feet and screamed our lungs out like it was a Broadway hit.  Why?  Because THAT’S what we fucking came to do!  So, to you sour, cranky, bitchy, petty (Taking a part away from a child two weeks before the curtain goes up because you don’t think they captured the character properly is cruel, you fucking cunt!), manipulative, mean, controlling, untalented, stuck-up, condescending, ugly piece of hot regurgitated dog shit, we’ll give your play one finger up.  Guess which one?  Exit stage left, bitch!