Tale #36: Playing All Our Cares Away

Adulthood is burdened by so many unpleasant things: work, taxes, chores, body aches, the inability to get up and down off the floor without grunting

We often lose sight of how fun and relaxing it can be to just simply play like children do.

From 2014 – 2017, VACT was in the thick of fundraising for the new building. I, as the obnoxious go-getter I am, tried to help in anyway I could. In 2015, we took a suggestion from one of our community members to host a “Parents Night Out” that correlated with our production of Shrek the Musical. We hosted two nights where parents could drop their kids off for babysitting while they attended the evening events at our local Hometown Days Festival (remember from previous posts: there’s a big parade, you got it).

The fundraiser was a smashing success. I had a great team of volunteers. A member of our lighting design team brought his massive gaming setup for the kids to play video games that were projected on the inside of the garage door. We had a tv in the music room that was playing movies all night if kids needed a quiet space. We had costumes for dress up, snacks, games, music, anything a kid could want. We ended up raising over $1000 for the new building project.

Since it had been so successful the first time, we recreated it for Halloween. While this one was not as popular, it still profited almost $400. That’s not nothing.

When you find a formula that works, you want to keep using it. So we thought let’s go for a third time and host a Black Friday Parents Day Out. Parents could drop their children off for babysitting while they did all of their Black Friday shopping. We thought people would love it.

It

Was

An

Epic

Fail.

We had assembled a team of volunteers that included Mama Terry, some of our teen show participants, and our lighting guy with his massive video game setup. We had purchased snacks. We had set up games. We had a crafts table.

Only problem was: we had no children to babysit.

When you are the captain of a ship that not only sinks, but descends so fast to the depths of the ocean that no one would ever find the remains, you don’t feel so great. The real kicker of my stupidity was that I did not require parents to pre-register their children. We had advertised it as a drop-in event. So, we couldn’t leave because we had no idea if any kids would eventually show up throughout the day.

For the first hour that no one was there, we all twiddled our thumbs, played on our phones, chatted amongst ourselves, the usual waiting activities.

The second hour, when we started to sense no one was coming, Mama Terry suggested we do a table read of her upcoming youth show High School Musical Jr. Ironically, this also became the day my mom realized that High School Musical Jr. was a stupid show with a terrible script. We sat around a folding table and went around the circle reading the lines of the show and listening to the music for each song.

The third hour, we started in on the snacks and played video games. I realized that I majorly suck at video games as I tried to get Mario to drive his stupid little cart through a ridiculous obstacle cart.

The fourth hour, we did the holiday crafts that I had designed for the kids. Could not tell you what they were, but I’m sure it involved green pipe cleaners because we still have the extra green pipe cleaners in the craft boxes.

During the fifth hour, when we started to get really bored, we got creative. We set up a baseball diamond in our pole-shed building and played baseball with a wiffle ball and a giant plastic bat. One hit sent the ball rolling right under a massive set piece for our upcoming holiday review “A Very Merry Hometown Christmas”. We sent one of our teen volunteers to army crawl under the set and get our ball back. He was completely covered in dust when he came back out with the ball.

During the sixth hour (mind you I had advertised an eight hour drop off window for this event), my mom and I said all of our other volunteers could head out since it was clear we were not going to have any children coming.

My mom and I finished out the 8am – 4pm Parents Day Out by cleaning up and planning out our auditions for High School Musical Jr.

Even though the day was an absolute bust fundraising wise, we all had a pretty fun time playing like children. The holiday season is an incredibly busy time at VACT as you are in the midst of the winter shows and preparing for the massive slate of youth shows in the spring. It was nice to have a day to play around and be silly like we expected the children we were there to babysit would have been.

The worst part of the day was that I had traded my morning Black Friday shift at Dick’s Sporting Goods for the evening Black Friday shift so I could run my fundraising event. So I still had to go and work six hours.