The Child Experiments with Being an Actor in Dramatic, Scary Stage Make-up

The Child Experiments with Being an Actor in Dramatic, Scary Stage Make-up
2006
View On White

How are H.o.p.’s acting classes going?

They are gearing up for the little play they will be presenting after next week. Next Saturday is the rehearsal for it. H.o.p.’s part is that of a “sports enthusiast”, which certainly takes some acting as he’s not at all interested in sports. All we knew last week is he had several lines about hoping the hockey game wouldn’t be rained out and needed to be carrying a blanket and pillow. For this, he decided he wanted a hockey helmet with dragon horns (horns he’d seen at a theatrical costume supply place), having decided the hockey team should be named the Ice Dragons. We didn’t manage that though I think it would be an interesting design element. Then yesterday he comes home with a few more lines. We don’t know anything about the plot except it has something to do with a spy and a computer virus (seems). He has a few more lines to rehearse and seems he has the privilege of being the person who punches out a billionaire. We rehearsed his couple of lines with him all last week so I imagine this week we will be rehearsing these other lines and H.o.p. punching me (stand-in) out.

He’s loving the class but he’s a little diasppointed that they’ve not done the last couple of weeks the acting games, and apparently yesterday was all writing of lines (according to him), just as they had to take notes last week, so he needed again help from one of the teacher’s assistants, We’d alerted them beforehand he’d not be able to transcribe and they have gladly helped but I rather wish there were printed hand-outs of lines instead and that they didn’t have to worry about writing things out. Though we’re having great success going through the AVKO Sequential Spelling 1 this year, focusing on word group/patterns, there’s no way he can yet begin to do notes and transcriptons. I always had a difficult time with trying to do notes in class too and could never read my own handwriting afterwards, for which reason I’m right now staying with all “military” block print with H.o.p., because it’s what I ended up using as an adult to make sure I could try to read later anything I had to handwrite. He’s starting to do a good job picking up on word patterns/groups but it felt kind of strange for me when I heard him crow yesterday, “Wouldn’t, couldn’t shouldn’t, those are all part of the same word group!” Those are words we’d worked on for two weeks and he was watching a video where they happened in a sentence altogether…not a language video, just a video. It was strange to hear him say this like it was some magical information carved out of gold, and I smiled and said great, yes, but sat here thinking that it is, after all, not carved out of gold, it shouldn’t be that important where any self esteem rests on his getting those words correctly, and it does, because no matter how many times I tell him it’s ok to not get something right, that it’s part of learning, he stresses over these things. I sit there thinking that really it shouldn’t matter too because what I want is for him to develop ease with typing so that he can use a computer fluidly to write thoughts and use spellcheck–to which end we started on learning typing last week and he actually practiced for a full hour one day (I didn’t learn touch typing until I was in Junior High and I don’t expect him to really get it down now). It’s slow going with the dyslexia but we’re getting there. Out of 25 words yesterday he spelled 22 correctly and was still relaxed enough, because he’d gotten so many right, that I was able to get him to write a few sentences using some of the words. He wasn’t ready for the AVKO last year and I wasn’t going to push him on it. This year he is ready and we’ve been doing the 25 words a day. Now, 6 times out of 10 he will write COULDN’T (reverse the L there though) instead of COUNIT or CODNT. We practice saying the words, we practice listening to the words, we practice air writing and tracing letters. Many times (not all) if he can’t get a word, like SCHOOL, if I tell him to picture it in his head, the image of the school, and then try to picture the word under it, he will then be able to get it on his own and write it correctly, but it takes time. Or if he gets a simple word wrong and I tell him to close his eyes and picture it he will sometimes get it right without my having to correct him. We practice building word recognition so that if he sees PERSEVERE and instead reads PRECIPITATION, I write out both words together so he can compare them and we break the words down into parts and little by little I introduce the idea of word roots and etymology, but it’s little by little because this is hard work.

He did great with his online language/reading exercises last year, but that was on the computer. I ended up not doing the writing supplements because he simply wasn’t ready yet. So this is a huge step for him this year, working on writing and spelling.

It is all slow going and every day an uphill hike, which is one reason I supplement history, science and everything else with so many videos and online learning resources that concentrate on videos, and spend so much time looking for things with pictures, because it’s still most important to me that he gets ideas, ideas, ideas and not have to worry about grappling with text, though I do that too in little bites. I try to balance me reading to him with his reading aloud.

And plenty of time for him to work on his animations. To me that’s essential education for him, and that predominates.

All such hard work for him and for me as well. But he sat down last night and for a game he made up he got some paper and rolled the paper up so it would be like a scroll (since people used to write on scrolls) and he took the time to write out short messages on the scrolls.

I did no art in September, just didn’t have the time, so took a little and worked a bit on Photoshop the past few days.

I did some post-production on of H.o.p. in his scary stage make-up, making it look a little bit like an old horror movie still poster.

(This morning for some reason I’m looking through the online Style section of the NYTimes (never do as absolutely irrelevant to my life) and marveling some over $21,000 chairs.)