I signed my son up for his school’s Talent Show this year. I’d been pressuring him for weeks to think about it, since he’s the equivalent of Sam I Am; hesitant to try new things despite a good chance he’s going to love the thing he’s resisting. Finally, with the deadline being today, last night my wife and I put pen to paper (not exactly, it was an online form) and made it official. Our son is going to be in his first talent show.
Will he be singing? No. Will he be dancing? No. Will he be playing his flute? No. Will he do magic tricks? No.
He’s going to be reading a short physics lesson from a university-level physics textbook.
This is what I’d been pressuring him to do from the beginning. Our son has always loved to watch science videos online, and the kids-appropriate stuff makes the lessons entertaining as well as accessible. He’s been parroting what he’s seen from those videos back at us for years now. It may not be the performing arts, but the performing sciences have always interested him. So I’d been saying, “Why don’t you do a science presentation like you do for us? No one will ever be expecting something like that at an elementary school talent show!” But of course, since I was the one pitching the idea, he was resistant to it.
All my wife, his favorite person, had to do was make one suggestion on how to go about it, and his face lit up in excitement. All resistance melted away and now, despite resisting my weeks of encouragement, he’s totally on board to do his talent show science presentation. I confess I’m a little grumpy about that, but I’ll get over it. The important thing is that he’s going for it.
He may have gotten the math and science affinity from my wife’s side of the family, but he’s also my son and it’s my job to try nurturing the inner theater kid that I know is in there somewhere. This will be an important step towards making that theater kid blossom or wither, depending on how he likes being on stage. Whatever the outcome, it’s important to me that he’s trying it out.
I won’t be able to make the talent show because I’ll be at Northeast Comic Con, but I can make it to the dress rehearsal the day before. However it goes, it will be a performance unique to my son, and I hope he realizes the value in that.