Well, that was interesting.
Alice won a spot in an open casting audition at WGBH, Boston's Public TV station and one where a lot of programs get made including Arthur, Fetch with Ruff Ruffman, Nova, Zoom (both the show of my youth and the show of my children's youth) and tons of other great stuff. It was a surprise to get in. It was fun to go. There were nearly 2000 kids (two thousand - I did not bobble the zeros) and they took them in groups of 10 and 11 and lined them up and took them off to do.... something.
Alice says the something consisted of telling them their name, age, where they're from, and answering one question. I heard from one kids she was asked what it was like being a cat, and that others in her group were asked super hero questions. Alice said she was asked about her new job. Her group was gone for a long time, but when she came back she ate everyhting in sight and some of my lunch and requested to visit the Science Museum. Which we did, since we were close, and not many people were out on account of piles of snow falling in the night.
The Museum had a special exhibit on mythical creatures and how people might have come up with them and whether there were any antecedents for them. There was some mention of how the Chinese developed their images of dragons based on bones of dinosaurs in the Gobi Desert, and how the Greeks developed ideas about giants and cyclopes from bones of mammoths around the Mediterranean. There was also a nice look at how ideas about the shapes of mythical creatures developed - the conflation of snakes and water goddess in Western Africa and how mermaid figureheads on European ships gave that idea a different form, and Mami Wata morphed into a mermaid BUT - she has to have a snake too, or she isn't Mami Wata.
Anyhow - there were sea monsters, land monsters, air monsters and many funny models, and we had fun until I felt faint from hunger, so Alice found the way to the food and made me eat, and then the place was closing so we paid our respects to the dinosaurs and headed home. The T. Rex has a cheerful scarf for the season.
Alice stated, after a completely mediocre supper at one of the identical rest stops on the Mass Pike, that this had been a most satisfying day - what with seeing the inside of WGBH, and then the Museum, and the mythical creatures - life was pretty good.
We will have a silent moment of gloating over what feels remarkably like sucessful parenting.
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