Tale #23: Far Too Much To Take In Here

Welcome back to Tales From A Hometown Community Theater! I took a couple of months off to get through the holidays and focus on my actual job (gotta pay for those holiday gifts). Now I’m back with your regularly scheduled programming.

To start off the new year, I thought I’d tell a simple tale. One with no deeper meaning or lesson to be learned. Just a funny chaotic moment in time.

Now, if you don’t know how the beginning of The Lion King starts then you probably have been living under a rock for the past almost 30 years. So, if that’s you, quickly take a moment to listen to the track posted above. Then you can continue reading.

Ok everyone caught up to speed? You should all now know that the very beginning of The Lion King is one very very loud note sung by Rafiki.

In April of 2009, the children’s show for Grades 3-8 was Getting to Know Once Upon a Mattress. My boyfriend at the time had been roped into helping by Mama Terry and I. His job was to run the music off of the iPod.

In 2009, Apple had an iPod Nano 4th Generation that had an interesting feature. If you shook the iPod, it would shuffle and switch the song.

Can you guess where I’m going with this?

My 15-year-old high school boyfriend was behind the iPod with it all cued up for rehearsal. We had about 50-60 kids on the stage ready to go. As you’ve probably gathered from my previous tales, corralling and managing large groups of children is difficult even when everything is going right.

So we finally have all of the kids on stage for rehearsal. They are listening and attentive. We are ready to start. Then my boyfriend dropped the iPod.

It shook.

It shuffled.

It played another song.

Louder than anyone would ever want to hear it, the opening lyric of “Circle of Life” came blaring through the VAHS PAC speaker system.

The children of course all started to scream or put their hands over their ears or laugh hysterically or all of the above.

Luckily, he did get it turned off pretty quickly and we were able to recapture the kids’ attention.

That relationship only lasted about three months, so luckily for him, that was his one and only youth production experience with VACT.