STOMP

We took The Kid to see Stomp on Sunday. I know, I know, everyone and their dog has already seen Stomp a thousand years ago, but not us. It was The Kid’s first big production live music kind of event, and in a lot of ways it was magic.

We never took The Kid to see Sesame Street on Ice or The Wiggles. Our most convincing reason for this was we were relatively certain he wouldn’t sit through it and it would be goodbye a week’s worth of grocery money. There was also the fact that in his earlier days, The Kid had a real aversion to loud and chaos, particularly the loud. These shows are loud and sometimes pretty chaotic so we, for the most part, stayed home.

In the meantime, The Kid has sat cooperatively through a couple of movies now and he loves rhythm and banging on things so, we thought it was worth a try. Lefty (who is also a world-class banger and drummer of things) wanted to see the show and so did I. We scraped together the endy bits of our extra summer money and bought tickets, good orchestra seats. We paid $7.00 to park and wandered into the beautiful Majestic Theatre and found our seats.

Here’s the good part: I think The Kid really got the magic and the wonder of live performers right there in front of you doing something really amazing.

And then there’s this: About 20 minutes in The Kid got really frustrated because he couldn’t see very well and he cried and thrashed around in his seat and had a mini-although-mercifully-quiet-tantrum. I pulled him onto my lap for about a minute, placated him with a Skittle and then he changed seats with Lefty from which he had a better view. He seemingly sulked for the next 15 minutes or so but the occasional Skittle helped a bit and he loosened back up. He also asked me sotto voice “How much longer?’ several times during the last half hour. This initially really frustrated me, until…

We left the theater and were hoofing it back to the parking garage and he was going on and on about what parts he liked the best. I think, despite everything else, he really did enjoy it. He even took the playbill to school for show and tell.