Toppers International Showbar and Kindergarten Musical

Last night was one of those memorial mile-markers in life—my daughter participated in her first kindergarten musical program. For the month leading up to the big day we were treated to many previews of the program as she practiced singing the songs at home, complete with hand motions and dancing. All five of the kindergarten classes at her school participated, each wearing different colored t-shirts to distinguish one class from another. Each class was also dressed as different animals to go along with the jungle theme for the evening. My daughter was a zebra, and afterwards I kept calling her “Marty” after the zebra in the movie, “Madagascar.” For an hour these kids sang and danced their hearts out for a capacity crowd of mostly family and friends in the school’s dual purpose cafeteria/auditorium; I think even Busby Berkeley would’ve been standing off on stage right nodding in approval. I should say that most of the kids sang and danced their hearts out; there were a couple of kids for whom it was obvious they were absolutely not having a good time. At one point I thought one of them was going to be sick. They’re kindergarteners, so they weren’t exactly ready for off-Broadway, but it was fun and funny and a good time was had by all.

Now I wouldn’t be writing about this if something strange didn’t happen. The lowlight of the evening came before the show even started. My wife and I arrived early because the child needed to be at her classroom half an hour before the start time, and we also wanted front row seats (it’s easier to take pictures from there). We had been in our seats perhaps five minutes when this girl, apparently a parent of one of the kindergarteners, sits down next to my wife. Something about her immediately made my spidey senses start tingling, some intangible feeling that there was something odd afoot that I should pay attention to. I’m not a professional when it comes to sizing up and assessing a person at first glance, but I was dead-on with this one. After ten minutes of squirming in her seat trying to get a signal on her cell phone, she finally is able to make a call to her mother in one of the most jaw-dropping conversations I’ve ever had the misfortune of overhearing.

For a moment I thought that perhaps I had fallen asleep and was dreaming that I was in the middle of a Blue Collar TV skit. But, alas, it was no dream. The conversation starts with this girl telling her mom all about her new car and how much it cost and how fast it will go (can you believe 150 miles per hour?!?!?!) and that her mom just HAS TO see it. I imagine the urgency of her mom seeing the car comes from the distinct possibility that this girl will wrap it around a phone pole in a Boone’s Farm haze while testing to see if it really can top-out at 150.

From there my wife and I are entertained by this girl’s ongoing saga with her soon-to-be-ex-mother-in-law and how she hasn’t seen her grandchild in over six months, and proceeds to get into detail on her divorce, which seems to be all but a done deal. She’s asking for child support, of course, from that no good husband of hers (whose name, I swear, is Elvis) . Then comes the memorable statement of the whole conversation. Everything up to this point leads up to this one sentence, the verbal equivalent of a professional wrestler pile-driving your head into the mat. “My attorney said that my job as a stripper might hurt my case some, but he done a good job so I gave him an extra $100.” At that point the show was just starting so the conversation came to a close, but not before my wife and I exchanged stunned glances and I made sure there were no poles in the cafeteria—just in case this girl felt like dancing along.