Cast Party

Last night, the local middle school put on their production of Fiddler on the Roof. One of my favorite kids from church was playing Tevye, so we went to the play. Lots of thoughts...

Seeing all the folks in town, and their relationships with one another through school and work and 4-H and just being neighbors, etc, kinda sorta made me feel like I'd like to be part of that. There's a community there that I'm not part of. I have my own community, but sometimes I wonder what it would be like to be part of this local close-knit group. A lot of them are such nice people!

The Sunday School superintendent (who is Tevye's mom) invited us to come over to their house for the cast party afterwards. I was impressed by the ability of the kids to be friendly with us strangers. This group of 7th and 8th-graders was not opposed to interacting with adults like most kids that age are.

Tevye's cousin didn't see the play last night. She was at a dance. She is Maggie's age. She's 12, and she spent her evening wearing jewelry and make-up and pop-style clothing, and dancing with boys. She's not a bad kid by any means. It just makes my head swim, though, to think of 12-yr-olds playing grown-up like that.

One of the boys at the party needed to go home just when we were leaving. He happened to live right on our way, so we offered to drive him. He seems to be a little slow, and his speech isn't very clear, and he was tremendously concerned when we were leaving because he'd lost his money. Perfectly nice kid. Turned out the lost money was 50 cents. I could very easily see Maggie in his position if she were attending school. The other kids were really much kinder to him than I expect from 13-yr-olds. And yet, you could see it -- there were a few rolled eyes behind his back, and the dumbfounded question about "you're that worried about 50 cents???" So then the pendulum swung back to being somewhat relieved that we (and Maggie) aren't so closely tied into the mainstream community.