High School Musicals

I'd moved around a lot by the time I reached eighth grade and that year, once again a new person in a school about to graduate clans of kids who'd known each other forever, I tried out for the school play, The Sound of Music. I won the role of Elsa based on my alto rendition of "No Way to Stop It" and the fact that my brother, sister, and I had grown up singing that soundtrack along with countless others (Windjammer, The Music Man, Peter Pan). I thus stood in line to kiss the guy who many (it seemed) considered highly kissable.

There was one small problem: I was ice skating at the time, competitively. There weren't enough hours in the day. "You'll have to choose," my mother told me, and I went with skating, but sometimes now I wonder what sort of first YA novel I'd have written if I had gone with the school musical instead.

I've loved school productions ever since—the stunning enthusiasm of the performers, the risks they take, the unfolding and uprising set designs, the costumes, that final moment when the entire cast swaggers out onto the stage for a last, congregating bow. One of my favorite final memories of my mother is of the night I took her and my father to the high school's rendition of The Music Man—of watching the look on her face as those 76 trombones swept down the aisle. The songs brought it all back—the house in Delaware, the room with the wall-length mural, the couch upon which my brother stood to conduct my sister and me. That night my mother, so often in pain, was happy.

This past week I took my father to the middle school production of Peter Pan (the same school where I might have been Elsa, only the building is new), where my friend's daughter was starring as the boy who won't grow up (and oh, can Alison Mosier-Mills sing), while Captain Hook was a perfectly roused-up menace, and Wendy was soulful and sweet, and Tinker Bell was a dazzling zipper of green light. Then yesterday we took our friends to the high school's Kiss Me, Kate, where Michael Browne, a snappily fantastic kid with whom my husband and I had traveled to Juarez, took on the starring role of Fred Graham. Michael might have been a gymnast but he fell in love with theater. He wanted to act, so he learned to sing. And does he ever entertain us.

I am left today in awe of young people who can imbibe those roles and stand up there fearless and give us everything they've got.

Don't stop.