LCC Christmas Show

Holy shit, it was incredible. I spent 5 hours solid chasing after kids; trying, and failing, to muster some sort of order. My bones ache, my throat hurst and I'm pretty sure I still have face paint plastered on my neck but it was honestly so much fun. My main jobs were to make sure that all 30ish kids were suitable costumed up from the extensive fancy dress collection, then send them off to face paint. Sounds relatively easy but in actual fact proved to be a ridiculous task - they have a tendency to not stand still for prolonged periods of time. Rascals. Of course I was dressed in suitable attire as well - a nice oversized jazz-tastic blazer and some rather fetching clown make-up.

Once the aesthetics had been taken care of we had a dress rehearsal, which if I'm honest probably couldn't have been more hectic, slightly worrying to say the least. Daryll hackett, the professional performer, arrived; the caterers started to set up shop; the audience had to be greeted; then show time! During the show it was my job as 'keeper of the mats' to make sure that crash mats and roll mats were on stage when needed, I pretty much had that one down I reckon. During the interval I managed to score a cup of tea and a hot dog, then someone threw a vegetable samosa my way and it kept me content.

The second half of the show was much less stressful as all the kids had performed their acts and it was their turn to watch Daryll's performance - shit me, the man is funny! He has the sort of humor that entertains kids to no end but a lot of it has a lower level aimed at adults, it was wicked.

When everything was finished I was amazed to see how many parents stayed behind to help tidy up. There's a real sense of collectivity amongst the children's circus that's pretty overwhelming. There's also been a number of thank you letters/emails forwarded to all the volunteers as well, from what I gather the parents are so appreciative of the opportunities available to theirs kids at circus - I know when I was little my parents never wrote thank you letters to any of the clubs I went to?? Something that also took us by surprise was the turn out, someone counted just over 100 people in the audience at one point which is way more people than we had chairs - evidently LCC is doing something right!