I’m a terrible person

I may seem harmless enough, but you have no idea the stuff that’s going on in my head.

Last night was the 3rd Grade musical at our new school. The theme was environments and habitats, and the scant information parents received said the kids could dress as their favorite animal, but nothing fancy. I had completely forgotten about it until Monday night, when Lily freaked the frack out about not having a panda costume.

Yesterday afternoon, I was the good mom and drove into South Austin to a craft store and bought black and white felt for Lily to make her costume. In retrospect, I should have bought fabric glue, too.

Assembling Lily’s costume became a last-minute, frantic flurry of Elmer’s school glue and super glue stuck to everything, including my hands. But we made it to school, costume safety pinned in place, just in time.

I am so glad I didn’t tell Lily just to forget about wearing a costume. Turns out the definition of “nothing fancy” is a lot different out here. One kid was in full-on gorilla suit. Another kid was dressed as a shark, complete with hair cut into a Mohawk and died blue. Then there was the boy with the very elaborate scorpion costume that involved a large papier-mache stinger. Oh, and the girl dressed as a peacock, complete with a full tail of peacock feathers.

I’ve always kind of thought the music teacher at our old school was a bit of a doofus. He gets so worked up and excited about the musical performances and works himself into a sweat directing the kids and running back and forth. I’ll take his doofussy enthusiasm any time over what I saw last night. The music teacher barely spoke or interacted with the kids and had about as much enthusiasm as a wet mop.

The students sang along to Up-with-People-esque recorded songs about the environment that were so loud we couldn’t hear the kids. While I’m not the biggest fan of these school shows, I do think a bunch of 9 year year olds singing their hearts out is pretty cute. Instead, I got to listen to professional, very happy singers while the kids moved their mouths and swayed on the risers.

Then they played along on recorders to another very loud song. I was texting my neighbor through all of this, and when I told her they’d brought out recorders, her one word of advice was, “Run!”

Just when I thought things couldn’t get more ridiculous, the kids started rapping – 50 white kids rapping. Actually, that’s not entirely accurate. The teacher played a rap song about the environment over the speakers while the kids did hip-hop dance moves and threw suburban gang signs in time to the music.

Fortunately, that was the last song, and after collecting Lily we made a break for the parking lot. On the way, though, a man wearing pressed jeans, a crisply starched white shirt, a huge belt buckle, boots, and a John Deere cap said to his son, “Dude. You had it goin’ ON!”

It’s official. I’m not in Central Austin anymore, and I’m really not a nice person.