Summer Reading program fiasco

I can't actually take credit for this stunning bit of writing - it's courtesy of the two summer reading coordinators who were in charge of the children's program this summer. But it's amusing enough that I might as well have written it, right? It also proves that things go wrong during all programs, not just mine.

Movie Event: Chicken Little (ages 3-11)

Get your popcorn and juice! Throw the DVD in and hit play and you’re good to go, right? Wrong. The first hour of this event could be justly described as a fiasco.

With seventy-one children sitting in front of the screen waiting, the Auditorium was packed. We provided popcorn or chips and juice for everyone, and the kids were just itching for the movie to start. The menu screen had already been looping incessantly (to the annoyance of the coordinators who had listened to it for the past forty-five minutes while filling a thousand cups of juice), and D hit play.

Everything seemed normal, until a few seconds into the film when we realized that the characters were all mute! At first this was thought to be some sort of affirmative action campaign played out in cartoon form, but we quickly realized that the problem lay with the sound. There was no dialogue! For some reason, the sound on the DVD player was not playing correctly, with only some sound effects and music being audible. We tried restarting the movie from different menus, turning everything off and on, reasoning with the DVD player, and changing other settings in every permutation. We also fielded many helpful inquiries and suggestions from the peanut (I mean parent) gallery. Most began with, “At our house, we…”

Remarkably, the kids didn’t seem to mind too much as they watched the first ten or twenty minutes of the movie over and over. Finally the call was placed and R was summoned from his lunch.

Meanwhile, R2 bought time by dressing up as a clown and prancing around the stage, waving streamers, blowing up balloons, and leading the children in “I’m a Little Teapot”, followed by her encore of “I’m a Special Teapot”. Just kidding. Instead R2 did the next best thing and drew door prizes.

J and D were planning to start some theatre sports or perhaps a Shakespearian reading when suddenly R arrived, a true hero in a true crisis. We assessed the situation once again and R brought in his laptop to play the movie on. It worked flawlessly, aside from the screensaver turning itself on every seven minutes, always during exciting action sequences. The movie ended and we emerged, disheveled and beaten, shaken and stirred, but clinging to moral victory.

Miraculously, the final playing of Chicken Little ended only about fifteen minutes after the event was supposed to end anyway.

Morals of the story: It is not enough to merely test the DVD player, the projector, and the sound system the morning prior; you must actually watch part of the movie and not just the menu. You must convince the equipment that working properly would be in its best interest.

Also, if you are trying to make something work and have refused to try a parent’s helpful suggestion for the past half hour, you had better hope that suggestion doesn’t work when you cave in and try it. (It didn’t in our case, thus bringing us moral victory.)

Thirdly, this event proves the Squarepants Theory, which states that children will watch anything appearing on a large screen in a dark room on a weekday afternoon. Perhaps the absence of light induces short-term memory loss…

And lastly, don’t panic, because eventually R will come to save you.