When Rube Goldberg Dreams...

Proving that there's no such thing as too many wonderful variations on a theme, OKGo tops their treadmill video with this unfrakkinbelievable Rube Goldbergesque video.

The Dream Role

It's been a crazy and emotional week around here. For almost two years, Asa has known that the theatre where she's been performing would be doing the musical Annie. Of course, as with so many little girls who fall in love with the story and the music, she dreamed of auditioning for the play and most especially for the lead part. So for quite some time she has been working hard on her vocals, stage presence, and other aspects of performance with the idea in mind that when the time came she would have a shot. Well, this week the time finally came. They announced the auditions and with a few days to prepare she started rehearsing the song "Tomorrow".

One thing I'll say about Asa is that when she puts her mind to something she is a very hard worker. In her favor is the fact that she memorizes things extremely easily (often to our dismay as she can recite word-for-word things like commercials you would rather forget). But she spent a lot of time on this song with me giving feedback, working on even minor details like where her eyes were looking, breathing, volume, timing, phrasing, and diction.

When the auditions came along, there were of course a number of girls hoping for the part, many of whom were quite talented. She knew it would be tough. Luckily, she got called back with a smaller group to a second audition (thus prolonging the agony of waiting to know of course). These girls were all so good, and I think it's a tough thing for any kid to go through working so hard for something and knowing that you might not get it. She has a great attitude though, and I've been impressed before when she's gone in for auditions and not gotten the part she wanted, just how mature she can be (much more so than I think I could be under similar circumstances!). She just sticks her chin out and troops on.

Well, the bottom line is that she found out yesterday that she got the part!!!!! So after a few months of memorizing a LOT of lines and singing a LOT of songs, she's going to stand on the stage and perform as Annie, which is really a dream come true for her. I'm so excited and yes very proud of her and all the hard work she has put in so far. She is so much like Annie in real life, so spunky and kind, good-hearted and mischievous, that I know she'll do just great.

Joyful Joyful

There is something indelibly sweet about the strains of Beethoven's Ode to Joy emitting from under a door frame, with this perfectly angelic voice singing the words to the hymn Joyful Joyful We Adore Thee....

....coming from the bathroom of course. I will definitely miss these days when my littlest angel still sings in the bathroom.

She's still on a Beethoven kick. Big bro sent her the Ode to Joy ringtone for her phone, and within minutes she was sitting at the piano and picking it out, playing the cellphone version then hitting the keys until she got the right notes, over and over. So I brought out my hymnal and since then she has been chipping away at learning the full chorded version. And of course singing it on the bike, at the pool, over dinner, in the bathroom.

Blown Away By Beethoven

Asa took a piano class at the homeschool resource center last term, they brought in little electronic keyboards and learned some music theory, started to learn to read music, etc. At the end of the term they had a little recital and she played a short piece, it was her 2nd piece of music that she's ever played with two hands. One kid at the recital played a version of Beethoven's 5th, and she fell in love with it and asked me if I could get a copy of the music.

In the week after her class got out, she taught herself to play this. Given that she doesn't fully read music, had never played chords before, and barely knew how to play with two hands, I'm more or less blown away by her playing. Check it out for yourself!!!



Watching her work on this reminded me of something our karate sensei said about diligence, that people who appear to have great talent are sometimes thought to just have a gift, for things to just come easily to them. But in reality such people also work very very hard at what they do, and their success is equally, if not even more driven by their diligence and hard work as by their raw talent. Watching her play this, it would be easy to assume that she is just very musically gifted. Well, of course she is. We've known that since she was an infant and started matching tones and notes with her wee little voice. But she also works very very very very hard at this stuff. Wayne was going nuts with how many times a day she was playing this piece, and I had to remind him that there are thousands of parents out there who would kill for their child to WANT to practice their piano music two dozen times a day. I did count one day, she played this song 27 times. Not all at once. Sometimes she sits down and plays it through several times. Sometimes she would go up to her room and play it on the "pipe organ" setting on her synthesizer keyboard and laugh maniacally like the Phantom of the Opera. Sometimes she would play it and only play each note once (even if the note repeated she would only play it once) and hold each note out really long. None of these are any kind of structured methodology, just her playing around and really having fun with her music.

I have no idea if music will eventually be her life's career, but I absolutely love to see her passion for it, her drive to perfect it, and the completely free way that she approaches it. Today I heard her singing upstairs and she had gotten out the music for the Broadway version of Beauty and the Beast and was simply singing through all of the songs. She doesn't think of this as "practice" and isn't in any way coerced to do this. It's just who she is and what she does. And I for one am totally in awe of her.

Take Me To The River

One of the things my kids remember most about the first time they visited their grandparents in Florida (hubby's parents) was one of those singing fish mounted on the wall like a trophy fish. It sang "Don't Worry, Be Happy" and "Take Me To the River". They loved it so much that years later, when they found one at a garage sale, they jumped around with elation and immediately bought it. I have to admit I was more than a bit glad when the darned thing finally quit working. It was funny at first, but the 30,000th rendition of snippets of those songs by a singing fish, well let's just say it wears a bit thin.

But "Take Me To the River" was certainly our theme for this last week. As hot weather moved in, we moved out to camp on the Rogue River with my mom. The idea was to meet up at the river, camp for a couple of days, and then Asa, my little Asa, my baby girl (well, okay, she's almost nine, but I can still think of her that way) was going to go and spend an entire week at grandma's house without us! You see, my mom has been telling us for a couple of years about the Missoula Children's Theatre, an organization that travels to various towns during the summer, setting up shop for a week. They bring a principal cast as well as sets and costumes for a full-scale children's theatre production, then audition local kids for the supporting roles. So Asa (of course!) wanted to audition. But the kicker is that it's hard for us to go South for a whole week, so she decided she could go on her own.

Also this weekend was the Bluegrass Festival in Prospect, just a few miles from our campground. My mom took Asa there for the entire day, and Asa ended up borrowing a fiddle and joining in a "band scramble", where various bands are put together ad hoc from the musicians at the festival. They had half an hour to rehearse, and then she played on the big stage. Her band played Old Joe Clark, which she has played before, and Cripple Creek which she hadn't. I guess she sang in both songs too, just ponying right up to that microphone. Her band won 3rd place, too!

I'm telling you, this girl is counting down the days until she is old enough to go on American Idol....

So now she's 160 miles away from us for the whole week, and she got a part in the children's theatre production (which is Rumpelstiltskin this year), despite over a hundred kids turning up to audition. We'll go see her performance this Saturday and then bring her home.

In the meanwhile, Mackenzie and I got plenty of time to hike together and then we spent Sunday and Monday camping together as well. We took a gorgeous seven mile hike along the Rogue River to the Natural Bridge and back, a place where the entire rushing river disappears into a lava tube and goes underground for a couple of hundred feet. It's hard to capture this phenomenon in photos, but it's very impressive in person. Then we decamped to Crescent Lake where we spent the next evening and day. All the boaters were clearing out from the weekend and we had the place almost to ourselves.

He's such a fun kid to hang out with, and I have to say that the great benefit to parenting mindfully and positively all those previous years is having an almost teenage kid that you really enjoy being with. We were walking along the lakeshore when we spotted a small shore bird, we think it was a mountain plover, tending a nest. I cautioned Mackenzie to be very careful, because their nests are often in shallow scrapes in the ground and very well camouflaged, we wanted to avoid stepping on it. Well, Mr. Eagle Eyes himself spotted the nest, with three eggs and one absolutely adorable fluffy baby bird:


This little birdie is about the size of my thumb, and the eggs not much bigger than my thumbnail, I can't believe he spotted them. By the time we left, we rechecked the nest and all four babies had hatched. What a wonderful end to the week's adventures!