You know how you are always agonizing for your children, feeling their slights, and embarrassments, and hurts?
Yesterday Ammo had the singing auditions for the upcoming musical, Meet Me in St. Louis (does that strike anyone as an odd choice but me? Last year it was Wizard of Oz- I'm beginning to think the director has a Garland fetish)
Anyway, Ammo has excellent pitch, he's very musical, but he has a vocal range of about three notes, which made finding an audition piece showing off his versatility difficult, but anyway, he settled on Mr. Mistopheles' song from Cats. We worked on it all weekend. I offered to go up to the school and accompany him, I kept telling him to add gestures, to SELL the song. (It's so awful having a mom who thinks she knows something)
He came home yesterday- I was waiting by the door eagerly. "How did it go!"
"Well, it was weird, I got up there and I forgot every word."
"Oh NO! How awful!" I began to die for him. There is nothing worse than losing the lyrics like that- I once had to invent an entire verse of a song when I blanked during a performance, and it even rhymed, although it made no sense at all. "What did you do!"
He shrugged. "I sang, 'Yada yada do be do' for the whole thing."
"Oh, Ammo. I'm sorry! Oh honey, it must have been terrible!" I'm breaking a SWEAT thinking about the humiliation my sweet, shy, quiet one must have endured.
"Naw. THey liked it. I did all the gestures like I was really singing it. They were rolling. The directors laughed so hard, they couldn't talk. I got a standing ovation."
I am amazed. He is perfectly content with his performance, and apparently so was everyone else. He said it didn't bother him at all. I can't imagine that... I would have died. He did say it was a good thing I hadn't accompanied him as that would have looked pretty stupid, to bring your own accompanist and then screw it and forget all the words like that.
But he thinks he was great.
Sometimes it's really hard to separate ourselves from them, and it probably would be sooo much less painful if we could do it.
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