Take Your Kids to Earth Day: The Musical

Today was both Earth Day and Take Your Kids to Work Day. A friend of mine had the idea that there simply must be a blog topic here.

There is. Kind of. Stay with me.

Back in the late '80s, I was a student at St. Luke's Lutheran School. I think I "graduated" from sixth grade with nine other kids, we wore knee-length dresses and attended chapel every Friday, and when I got busted for cheating on one little spelling quiz during the last week of my last year there, I truly thought (and kind of hoped) I was going to be brutally beaten and then assassinated by a firing squad. When I finally set foot in the public school cafeteria wearing red hairbows in my pigtails in seventh grade, "You down with O.P.P?" being shouted by some 13-year-old was truly music to my ears.

Anyway, back at St. Luke's, we were really into musicals. Not just any musicals, of course. One particular musical that comes to mind was called, "It's Cool in the Furnace."

Here's a sample. (This isn't my school, by the way, but this is pretty much identical to us 20-some years ago.)



Now, I don't know why, but I somehow ended up with solos or lead parts in most of these things. Maybe it was because I ooze natural talent. Maybe it was because my mom was a kindergarten teacher at the school. Whatever. In the above musical, I sang a nasally solo about dreams...in a drop-waist diagonal-striped dress with Keds, of course.

In one production, "Androcles and the Lion," I was the rhyme-dropping lion.

One of the productions was some kind of Earth Day thing. We were actually pretty ahead of the times, us St. Luke's Crusaders (uh-huh), considering the holiday has only been around for 40 years now. I won't even go into the countless hours I spent outside with my classmates in the cold, crushing aluminum cans into little discs.

The part I landed in the Earth Day musical was Susie Soda Pop Bottle. Out of curiosity, I looked it up. It seems that "Susie Soda Pop Bottle is a 1950s rock 'n roll girl who loves to dance. She has a very bubbly personality." Well see, here was the thing about that.

Here was what I was wearing:

(Except I said "Soda Pop," of course.)

...plus a dash of...

Yes, I was a giant 10-year-old cheerleading, singing plastic bottle. I didn't want to come out of the bathroom. Once I was coaxed out of hiding, I was far from "bubbly."

So there you go, Grant, that's the best I can do tying kids and Earth Day.