Sin City

If my week is an accurate experience of Las Vegas, then it truly is “Sin City.” I don’t mean that I debauched my way down the Strip, anything but. What I mean is that my week had more than a few hellish moments. While the weather was delightful and the sights of the Strip were interesting, the kids turned out to be the most difficult group I’ve worked with. In short, they were the devils of Sin City.

It started with the auditions. Roughly 100 kids showed up, which is a lot to audition, but nothing outside of normal. Usually once we start the kids listen and attempt to be on their best behavior, eager to get a part. This audition involved stopping time and time again to quiet the kids, with no lasting effects. Even stopping the audition entirely and waiting for them to quiet down did nothing. This was not a good sign.

On Wednesday when we had the whole group together for the first time, it became apparent that the goal for this week was getting through it. Our first run through on Thursday took about 4 hours and many of the kids had no idea what they were doing in some scenes. One girl in particular stared blankly at us every single time her turn to speak came around, and once prompted with her line, displayed no visible signs that she had ever heard the line before. She had that look the entire week.

We established a goal of getting through the show twice on Friday and made it very clear that we were not in good shape. Friday came around and this time a full run through took well over two hours. On show day, J.D. had to prompt 50-75% of the lines.

And learning the show wasn’t the only thing the kids had trouble with. Listening was a foreign concept to them, following directions a laughable idea, and silence wasn’t anywhere to be found in their vocabulary. For example, during one of the shows on Saturday I found a girl chewing gum. I asked her to spit it out three times during the show. J.D. also asked her three times during the show. I don’t even need to tell you what was in her mouth when she came out for the finale. And she was not an aberration. The majority of the kids could not follow simple directions; even if we told them twenty times in twenty different ways what to do, somebody would come up to us and ask us what the instructions were. I’ve seen many kids with attention problems, but this week was unbelievable.

It wasn’t that these kids didn’t have the talent, many of them were completely capable and there were a few that gave great performances. And most of them had good hearts and positive attitudes. But it was obvious that they had never been taught how to follow directions. We learned that many of the kids came from difficult homes and perhaps inconsistencies with and/or lack of discipline there, among other things, contributed to their inability to simply listen and respond.

As if all of this wasn’t enough, we also had a missing child scare. On Thursday after the first rehearsal block, the seahorses go home while the rest of the kids stick around for another couple of hours. All of the seahorses left and we continued our rehearsal. About 30 minutes later, a boy comes in looking for his sister, one of the seahorses. We told her that she already left and went home with who we thought was her mother. About 15 minutes later two girls come in looking for the girl as well. According to them, the girl was supposed to walk home with her brother who was frantically running around the school looking for his sister. We told them that we were pretty sure his sister went home with her mother. They told us that her mother was working and couldn’t have picked her up. We called in the assistant principal and they worked on tracking down this girl. While all this was going on focusing on rehearsal was nearly impossible. The pit in my stomach grew larger with each passing minute as I searched my memory for any clear picture of this girl leaving. As the assistant principal was about to call the police, it was discovered that the girl had gone home with her mother, just as we thought. It turned out the mother had picked up her daughter and purposely didn’t tell her son to teach him a lesson. Apparently he had been late several times before picking up his sister. The mother didn’t bother telling anyone else about her “lesson” leaving us to panic about her daughter.

Despite it being a horrendously difficult week for us, I’m sure the experience was beneficial for those kids. We have no idea what the impact of that week was for them. I hope it did some good.