Bedecked

For about an hour on Tuesday and almost three hours on Wednesday I heard auditions for the high school musical and felt formidable.  Really, I'm a friendly person; I smile a lot. But it's hard to appear approachable to a teenager who has to perform a monologue and sing a solo in front of you and two other adults.  You throw a long shadow.

My own daughter, who absolutely blew everyone away with her rendition of "Take Me Or Leave Me" from Rent and got the lead in the show--the part she really wanted--said to her friends after the audition:
"There's nothing like an audition to melt away all of that brash cockiness the moment you take one look at a director's nightmarish 'listening attentively' expression."

We have a very good cast, and I have a new appreciation for the bravery of teenagers in a situation that, on some level, really doesn't demand bravery. I mean, it's not like it matters that much if a kid can sing in public!  It's like the bravery in this poem, Bedecked:

Tell me it's wrong the scarlet nails my son sports or the toy
store rings he clusters four jewels to each finger.

He's bedecked. I see the other mothers looking at the star
choker, the rhinestone strand he fastens over a sock.
Sometimes I help him find sparkle clip-ons when he says
sticker earrings look too fake.

Tell me I should teach him it's wrong to love the glitter that a
boy's only a boy who'd love a truck with a remote that revs,
battery slamming into corners or Hot Wheels loop-de-looping
off tracks into the tub.

Then tell me it's fine--really--maybe even a good thing--a boy
who's got some girl to him,
and I'm right for the days he wears a pink shirt on the seesaw in
the park.

Tell me what you need to tell me but keep far away from my son
who still loves a beautiful thing not for what it means--
this way or that--but for the way facets set off prisms and
prisms spin up everywhere

and from his own jeweled body he's cast rainbows--made every
shining true color.

Now try to tell me--man or woman--your heart was ever once
that brave.

Some kids have to be especially brave about being different.  I think that's a lot easier today than it was in the past, but it's still true that no matter what role you want to play, being a teenager and admitting that you have desires can take as much courage as anything else you work yourself up to for the rest of your life.