Another Milestone

When I was around three years old (might have been four, but I think it was three), my mum and dad decided I should join the local amateur dramatic society (the Freshford Music and Drama Group). I made my debut as a singing field mouse in Toad of Toad Hall. I'm sure that I was unbearably cute and that my presence on the stage alongside numerous other small and unbearably cute children helped to ensure plentiful sales of tickets to assorted relatives.


Some photos of this momentous occasion do exist in a long-buried and dusty archive and if I ever find them and get around to converting them to digital format, I promise to share them with you. As regular readers will know, I've been showing off on stage or at least in public in some form or other ever since.


For now, however, we have the same sort of milestone in NooNoo's childhood. He has taken the slightly more traditional route of taking a role in a nursery nativity play. He has also beaten my debut-at-three-years-old record by appearing live on stage at the age of two and nearly-three-quarters.


Yesterday Mrs The Millbrooker and I did our grandparently duty and sat ourselves in St Matthias' church in Plymouth to eagerly await a performance of the age-old and seasonal nativity story. We didn't have to wait long before NooNoo appeared, not in costume due to a late arrival backstage after a potty training related "accident" at home.

The nursery assistants soon had him into costume. He'd decided he wanted to portray one of the stars that looked down on the baby Jesus in the manger. This decision was, I believe, based purely on the nice shiny costume.

NooNoo had evidently decided that his star would be a thoughtful one.

In some considerable disarray (I believe this is traditional in infant nativity plays) the gaggle of stars, wise men, sheep and shepherds had eventually all stumbled past the manger, paying their respects to the putative king of kings by mostly managing not to wet themselves and only occasionally deciding they'd rather run into the audience to see mummy. (To make sure the record is straight, NooNoo remained dry throughout and barely glanced at his mummy, Nana or Dragon Lord).


Mummy was, of course, very proud. As was Nana.

So was Dragon Lord, but no one took a photo of him.


After the performance, of course, came the curtain call. During which NooNoo demonstrated that he instinctively understands the art of stage craft: "get to the front, get to the centre and dominate the stage".

Dozybean saw NooNoo immediately afterwards, before he was whisked off to the green room to enjoy a Christmas lunch and tells me that he had some "vague notion" that he'd done something "laudable", but perhaps didn't quite know what. Nor, indeed, why.


Great stuff and very very funny.