Rúmlega þrjú ár síðan, konan mín og ég skráði son minn upp í sumar starfsemi, The Midland Park Players. This is a drama group that spends about three or four weeks preparing for a play and then showing it to the parents, friends and relatives. It’s always been done very well.

Ég veit ekki hvort barn allra er eins og þetta, but my son is extremely reluctant to try new things. Knowing this, we signed him up for the program. We’ve found that it’s best to alert him to these kinds of things early and often. Svo, í því skyni að sigrast á náttúrulega tregðu hans, Við sögðum honum snemma og gerði okkar besta til að gera það hljóð eins og gaman, o.fl.. Even with a multi-month advertising campaign, he still wasn’t convinced. We forced him to do, þó, og eins og er oft raunin, he had a great time.

Með því að næsta ár velti um, he had once again convinced himself that he didn’t want to participate. En, við höfðum skrifað undir hann og á núll-dagur, I dropped him off one morning at the high school where they practice. When I went to pick him up after lunch, hann var mjög spenntur, allar brosir og tilkynnt, "The play is the Velveteen Kanína and I want to be the Rabbit". He had spent literally months carrying on (stundum hysterically) um hvernig hann vildi ekki hafa neitt að gera með leikmenn Park og eftir fyrsta dag, he wants to be the lead role in the play. We’ve seen this pattern before.

(Mikið að koma á óvart okkar, Hann gerði fá Kanína hlutverk og hann var ótrúlegt.)

Fast forward a few years. He’s been in Park Players three times now, so he’s something of a veteran. This summer (2008), Players starts up again. Í the meðalvegur tími, hann er loksins sannfærður okkur að hann í raun doesn’t want to play soccer and he never liked basketball. That left him with no extra-curricular activities for late Winter / early Spring. A client with whom I was working mentioned that his daughter was in a program called Stage Right. Stage right is a slightly more expensive version of Park Players and it’s not in my town, but adjacent to it. Perfect.

The thing to know about that town is that it’s practically another country in terms of wealth. It has a high-frequency train right to Wall Street and NYC in general. It’s just a wealthy place. One of the on-going family discussion themes is whether we should have moved to that town instead of where we live now. It’s a bigger town, skóla bjóða fleiri forrit fyrir börn, o.fl.. My wife grew up in that town and her parents live there, so we are "hooked in" despite not living there. I personally grew up in different circumstances in Massachusetts, so I don’t have a lot to say about this during family dinner conversation. This isn’t to say that we aren’t very happy where we live. We just know that that town is a level above our town economically.

Stage Right’s next program started too soon for us to launch our normal advertising campaign to overcome my son’s reluctance. This is when he came up with one my personal favorite arguments against doing something: "Friday nights are blómi nætur fyrir utanríkis sofa!" Stage Right was going to interfere with his weekend socials.

Í dag kemur, við að koma honum þangað og sleppa honum burt og eins og með allt annað, eðlilegt ást hans bara að vera á lífi tók og hann hefur verið að hafa góðan tíma með það.

Þetta síðasta helgi konan mín var að tala við hann og í fyrsta sinn, I think he’s tailoring his discussions very precisely for his audience. She had asked him how Stage Right compares to Midland Park Players. He tells her that "In Park Players, we have teenagers that help us out. There aren’t any in in Stage Right. In Park Players, teenagers make all props. In Stage Right, we have to bring our own props. We have to do everything. And then he twists the knife: "I thought this was supposed to be a rich town."

Öll þessi ár, I never really thought that he was hearing or understanding anything as it related to the "rich town". Hins, það kemur í ljós að hann var.

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