My 90 year old friend has, for the past two decades, volunteered at a local elementary school. She's done many things for the school including sucking in a number of her friends to help out. For example, I have been a reading tutor, written a play for her to produce and direct, sewed costumes for several of her extravaganzas and now, am her occasional driver.
Which is what I did recently. She'd just had surgery and wasn't driving so I took her to the school where she was at the tail end of a term with six kids doing radio plays.
Yes, you read that correctly. She does radio plays. Kids who have never known radio as anything other than a place to get their music are entranced with what she teaches them--pro-JECTING, coloring your words to get the meaning across, using sound effects. Walking through the school, she is greeted with hugs by all the kids she has worked with in the years she has been there and kids complain if they think they won't have the chance to work with her before the school year runs out.
So, for the past two Wednesdays I've driven her to the school and watched her work with the kids. The first Wednesday, it was a final rehearsal. Last Wednesday was a performance before two classes of fourth graders.
Six kids sit at desks at the front of the room, scripts in hand, nervous expressions on their faces. My friend, who has been given the best chair in the room, has a cardboard "on the air" sign held up to get silence. With her fingers she counts down from five and on one, the narrator--her stories always have narrators--begins the story of "The Three Little Elephants," a re-telling of "The Three Little Pigs.'
When they finish the first play, there is a brief intermission before they go on to the second play about how Portland, where the school is located, got its name.
At the front of the room, where I always sat when I was in grade school, the kids are well-behaved, pay attention and clap enthusiastically when each performance is over. No surprise, when the teacher asks how many of the boys and girls present have worked with my friend, the entire front of the room holds up hands.
I am in the back of the room, surrounded by boys. The ones who can't keep still, would never volunteer for a radio show and are bored listening to one. The ones kids like I was would secretly admire but didn't dare emulate and irritate the teacher. The ones who often grew into those cute high school bad boys girls like me never dated but always watched with interest.
The guys around me fake-cough through the first play. My friend and her six actors don't seem to notice. The teacher does. She comes over and, glancing at me as she talks quietly to them, gets them to stop. They do. Well, pretty much.
She throws me an apologetic look as she returns to her post at the side of the room where she can see everything better. I smile. If I knew her better, I'd tell her it was fun for once in my life to sit in the back with the bad boys. Made me feel a little naughty. Not an altogether unwelcome feeling at my age.
