The Audition to Sleeping Beauty

We arrived at the audition for Sleeping Beauty as other couples of parents and daughters and sons filed into the great event tent. Smiling greeters couldn’t crack the fear and anticipation so many children and parents wore on their faces.

“We will do as much of this as possible,” I spoke to myself. It was the mantra that got me through most occasions. “Just show up and see where God takes us.”
It was the absence that killed me more than being present and ready to face the challenges we were meant to face. I could live with, “You tried your best,” but I wouldn’t do as well with, “You didn’t try at all.”

Hannah had no fear. She smiled all the while as we signed in and moved through the crowd. Do her best? Sheeze! She always gave her best, whether she was running at practice or hugging a friend. We moved away from the crowd to a small group of children and stood silently taking in the scene.

I turned to one little girl the size of Hannah and said, “Have you been in a class play before?” She nodded and smiled with her grin of spaces where teeth had fallen to fairies.
“Oh, really, which one were you in?” I asked, “Was it fun?”

We laughed about performance mishaps and introduced one another. The children became eight-year-olds in the moment as they compared heights face to face, measuring off with their hands saluting each other’s foreheads, and pointing to the gaps in each other’s mouths. I loved the fact I could rely on kids being kids without much prompting at all.

Hannah held her own and stayed in the line formation for over an hour of the audition. She said what she was supposed to say, she smiled and charmed to the best of her ability, and she was asked her name by the woman with the clipboard. I knew she had made it.

She ran over once to say, “Please, can we go out to lunch?”
I agreed and shooed her back to her place in line of over 200 children between the ages of six and eighteen. She stayed five minutes longer and ran back around the wiggling snake of children in line and asked, “Italian, please?”

“Yes, yes,” I said. She could have asked for anything as we were already into auditions for an hour and forty minutes. I knew the end was near and I crossed fingers to finish.

She made it. They stumbled on her last name, but she popped up out of the mass of seated children waiting to hear if they made the cut. She stepped and skipped around children to make it to the front to receive her yellow and purple slips where she was introduced as one of the GRUMPY CATERPILLARS.
She ran over to me immediately and said, “Out to lunch!”