I am under duress at work… I am a certified procrastinator for important projects. I will be obsessed with it, can’t stop thinking about it, being kept awake at night worried about it, but feel at the same time utterly powerless. It is like end of term at school with multiple papers due all over again… The fear of failure sometimes gets too overwhelming.
I found myself humming inside my head the songs from Mary Poppins on Broadway while I plowed along on my presentation… First up is, what else?
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Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious!
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Then I move on to…. “Anything Can Happen (If You Let It)”
Anything can happen if you let it
Sometimes things are difficult
But you can bet it doesn’t have to be some…
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Just what I need to hear right now… The following always gives me the goosebumps:
If you reach for the stars
All you get are the stars
But we’ve found a whole new spin
If you reach for the heavens
You get the stars thrown in
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The last one is currently my “theme song”. I am sharing with you my secret right now… It is what gets me going on some of these days when I am so almost convinced that I suck at everything… I just hum it as I go along with the motions until, miraculously,
The other day when my 6-year-old was very frustrated with me for saying NO to most of his requests, he sighed and said with longing, “I wish Mary Poppings is my mom.”
Startled but not offended, laughingly I said, “Yeah, I wish she were your mom too.”
He in turn was shocked by my non-reactive reaction.
Then today, after pointing out to me that I didn’t feed him a “proper” dinner (Note to self: Bagel with cream cheese does not count as a “proper dinner”), he said, in mock-earnestness, “I am going to ask Santa for a better mom.” “Oh, I am just kidding.”
Ah, a great sense of humor is the sure sign of intelligence, I always say.
Being self-reflective to a compulsive degree, I often picture my kids sitting in a shrink’s office, discussing their childhood with their unstable mother and her effect on their great novels of the decade. Perhaps all the tribulations in our repressingly liberal suburban household will become cannon fodder for their artistic endeavors one day. One can only hope.
Coda: Turned out that hot dog on a piece of white bread (since I don’t buy buns because they always go bad before we can finish them) is an acceptable entree for dinner. Thank goodness.
p.s. I am well aware of this:
self-reflection + lack of action to correct any un-motherly behavior = rampant self-indulgence in the guise of mock self-pity
We spent a too-short weekend in the New York city some time this year, and the boys fell in love with the city. At first we were worried that they might be bored since there really wasn’t much to do, if you are a kid, once you subtracted museums and walking around and watching people. Turned out my kids made mama proud by enjoying all of my favorite activities: art museums, strolling in the big cities, and people watching. (And yes, my youngest enjoys Starbucks as much as the next Yuppie… guilty as charged, but only for the whipped cream they generously give him there).
We went to TKTS at around 7:30 pm at night and Mary Poppins was one of the shows available. The 10-year-old was not too sure, “This is a show for girls!” Well, next to “The Little Mermaid” his complaint seemed unfounded, so off we went.
This was not the first equity theatrical productions that they had seen, but Broadway shows are truly magical, and I had forgotten how magical until I went with my children. The looks on their faces almost brought tears to my eyes. I was able to experience the excitement and magic (I know I keep on using this word, but I don’t know what else to say…) through their eyes. My youngest was sitting at the edge of his seat the whole time– he was that enthralled.
Remember the song Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious ? In the movie version, it was a short episode, a mere comma, a distraction from the main plot, if there is one to speak of… In the Disney production, they extended the song and made it into the main chorus number. They also used it as the encore number after curtain, and invited the audience members to stand up and sing (and Dance!) along. My boys were delirious! (though my 10 year-old would certainly not admit this now. “What? Moi? No way!”) The excitement was palpable in the theatre during this number, we were humming and dancing the whole way back to our hotel, and I had earworm for at least two weeks afterwards. Here is a clip of the production in London IF you also want to catch the same earworm…
Mary Poppins will be on tour starting 2009(the linked page plays MUSIC automatically, I hate it when they do this, so don’t click on it if you are at work and your computer sound is on) with the same cast that we saw in NYC. Do check it out if they are coming to a city near you: it is worth it!
******************** Spoiler alert: ******************** Our cheap seats landed us way up on the right side of the auditorium. We didn’t mind at all. Turned out they were THE BEST seats in the house because at the end of the story, remember? Mary Poppins flies away in the movie? Well, she did in the show! A “gasp” in unison could be heard when Mary Poppins started ascending, and she flew right in front of us: so close that if we had reached out, we could probably have touched her dress. It was such a great temptation, like hypnosis almost, to be honest, I had to sit on my hands to refrain from doing exactly so…