Triple Threat

I don’t write much about my family, but I feel I need to give props to the Little One. She just graduated from pre-school last Friday, so now I’ll be watching her on a weekly basis until I find work, which will hopefully be soon once I’m fully repaired. She is quite a character, though I’m sure all parents think each and every one of their children is “quite a character.” But I gotta brag here for a moment. My daughter is a triple threat, and I just caught it on video.

This morning we dropped off Patch at the sitter’s and ran some errands together. One stop involved a trip to the local library, where we borrowed the newest Thumbelina DVD (for watching this afternoon after the nap) and a picture book on flowers (we’ve mastered birds so now we’re moving on to the horticultural sciences). Then we went to an anonymous large chain book store where I bought, at her request, the CD to “The King and I.” * Oh, and I forgot to mention that during the whole errand run we’ve been listening to “The Sound of Music.” Well, the Little One was; I was listening to her sing along with Maria, Georg, and the children.

Then, at home, while I’m cooking us up some lunch, she grabs a toy microphone (she has three of them) and spontaneously bursts into song and dance, trotting up and down our narrow kitchen like she’s working an arena-sized crowd. Punctuating her moves with a shouted “Rock on, Seattle!” I dropped everything and hunted out the camcorder and videod ninety seconds of this, thinking, hmmm, one day this’ll be shown globally on American Idol 2021.



See, she’s a triple threat. She can sing, dance, and we think she can act. She certainly knows how to act sick when we feed her vegetables. As far as the singing and dancing goes, well, the talent is there. There’s definitely workable raw material there. Of course, she’d need some training, but I think my wife and I are game. There’s definitely dance lessons at some point in her future, if only because it seems that every girl in this state takes them. But she’s still only four, and has plenty of time in front of her. At this stage, we just laugh and enjoy it, record it for posterity, and encourage it as much as possible.

As far as the acting goes, I got a plan. Lately, every now and then, especially when driving and I can watch her in the rear-view mirror, I ask her to do, oh, say, an “Excited Face.” She’ll comply. Then, I ask for a Mean Face. Then, a Scared Face. We go through the whole emotional range. Some of her expressions are hilarious. She does have a gift for comedy (some of the things she says make us shake our heads in disbelief, thinking, My God, this child didn’t even exist five years ago!). I crack up. She cracks up. It’s fun. It’s a small foray into acting, good enough for now. Though I do have a dog-eared copy of Hamlet floating about (I had to do a speech from Shakespeare during a Public Speaking class I took ten years ago). But we’re not about to tackle that.

Yet.


* Also scored three small paperbacks for ninety-seven cents: the hippie bible Journey to Ixtlan by Carlos Casteneda, a nifty little mystery The Singing Sands by Josephine Tey (a writer I vowed to seek out after reading her masterful The Daughter of Time), and an interesting little book on the philosophy of symbols.