Lion King!

The two girls love theater and this fall, they tried out for the musical Lion King Jr. with the local community youth theater group.  They both got parts--Eliana was an antelope and Karina was a wildebeest.  You have to be eight to try out and Karina just turned eight.  This was her first show ever.

They rehearsed, memorized their songs, and learned their dances every weekend for 6 weeks.  You can see Karina in the background of this picture.  They also had to learn how to put on their make-up because they need to do it themselves before each show.

The week before the show started, they got to watch their musical-mates perform.

And here they are backstage just before a show.  Karina has the huge white horns and brown costume in the front of the picture.

There were 7 shows over two weekends.  The whole family went to watch, even Yeh-Yeh and Nai-Nai who flew in from California.

It was a wonderful show, with impressive costumes, wonderful singing, and neat choreography.  The actors were encouraged to mimic the moves of the animals they were representing.

 Karina was part of a herd of wildebeests.

 Eliana, on the far right, was part of a grasslands ensemble.

If you are familiar with the story, you'll know that the wildebeests stampede and trample Mufasa.  Karina, in the front, left, was helping to do the stampeding.

In the intermission, Gabe ate a snack and when he saw the sign below, decided to become a rebel and  put a handful of granola bar beyond that point.

And then the show came to an end in the second act.  Both girls were on stage for the final scene where Simba and Nala introduce the new baby lion to the world.

Lots of friends and relatives came to see the show.  Afterwards, the actors come out from backstage so that you can say 'hi'.  Mommy was there because she was a volunteer parent in charge of the green room.  She attended every single show!!!

All the actors got to take staged pictures at one point in time.  Here is the "herd" of antelopes.  Eliana is in the bottom right hand corner.

 Here is the herd of wildebeests.  Karina is second from the right side, on the bottom.

And here is the entire cast and crew--all 90 of them!  It was quite a large production and they pulled it off very well without actually that much time to rehearse!

And there's a tradition with this theater group that the high schoolers will sometimes go out at night and leave a bunch of plates and plastic forks in the front yard of other actors.  It's called getting "forked" and it's considered an honor to get forked.  Our house got forked one night; the only hiccup was that Elvin heard noises in the front yard and when he saw teenagers fooling around, he didn't know about this forking tradition and considered calling the police!  They ran away when they saw him peering out the window.

We are very proud of our girls and all the hard work they put into the show!