Sacred Drum and School Daze

Well, first it was Abigail, and now it is Hillary.  Abigail had one impromptu and one planned musical performance a few days ago; and Hillary just had a planned musical performance only a few days after an impromptu one herself.  Allow me to explain:

Sunday morning, the children's choir to which Abigail and Hillary belong sang for church.  Since they were seated in the choir area at the front of the church, they were just a few steps away from some of the instruments that the musicians had set up to accompany parts of the liturgy.  The girls' church choir director played an African drum and invited Hillary to come over and play it along with her.  We were seated in the pews directly in front of them, so we watched Dr. Burns prompt Hillary, through words and actions, to mimic her and follow the rhythm that she herself was playing.  How fun!

Hillary playing an African drum with Dr. Burns

And tonight we attended Hillary's music program at school.  It was called School Daze and featured a few humorous scenes of school events (e.g., taking a test, eying the boys/girls in the cafeteria) and several songs along that same theme.  All the kids sang all the songs while on rows of risers; but for each song, certain kids had been chosen to go to the stage to act it out or sing solos or perform choreography, etc.  Hillary acted in a scene/sang a song about a misunderstanding in the cafeteria: several tables of girls noticed a lineup of boys looking at the girls, who assumed the boys were flirting; however, when we heard the boys' comments about the same scene, we learned that they were really just eying the girls' pizza!  Typical elementary school boys.

On the back wall of the stage, the name of the program was written on a giant image of a chalkboard, and equally over-sized images of school supplies were pasted up on either side of that.

When Hillary spotted where we were sitting, she beamed at us!

Susan's dad joined us at home for supper beforehand and accompanied us to the performance, and Hillary was delighted to have Grandpa there.  She was a bit nervous to have Suzanna there, though, thinking that certainly Suzanna would try to make Hillary crack a smile during one song for which she was supposed to act like a bored student.  (As it turns out, Suzanna had no intentions of tripping up Hillary.)  It was a cute program, and Hillary did very well, as expected.