Road Trip

Pick a Show

"Hey, Eleanor!" Mary asked. "Are you doing the school show this year?"

"Of course," I grinned. "How about you?"

"Duh!" She laughed. "There's a meeting in Mr Small's room at lunch today. See you in maths!"

She left for chemistry and I rolled my eyes. She was far too excitable.

· · · ·

"As some of you may know, I spent my summer thinking about how we're going to top 'Back to the 80s', which was a big success," Mr Small began. Mary and I shared a glance - half happy we'd done so well, half sad it was over. "Quite a few people have been wanting to 'Hairspray', but unfortunately we don't have the ethnic diversity for it." There were expressions of disappointment on many faces, but 'Hairspray' was too much like 'Back to the Eighties' anyway in my opinion.

Mr Small went on to list possible plays we could do - I personally wanted to do Lion King, and Mary agreed. I'd also have liked to do Les Miserables, but we'd done that about six years ago and that isn't long enough for us to be able to recycle it. Maybe in a few years. At the end of the meeting, we all signed a piece of paper to say we were interested, though Mr Small reminded us it wasn't any sort of binding contract and we could still opt in or out - the unbreakable vow would come at a later date.

I made sure to take in who was going to do it this year - in particular guys, as we had had a shortage of those last year and Mary had ended up cross dressing. Aside from myself and Mary, there was our friend Ellen, my older brother Joseph with his friends Sophie, Ryan and Teddy, some other guys in their year, quite a few people that I didn't know, and some girls in our year I didn't think would last long. I wasn't sure how many of them could actually sing, and I wished last year's leavers were still here. This was what we had, though, and we would have to make do. It sounded really rude, but the school shows are a big deal here, and I had to do well to live up to my sister's standards from when she'd starred a couple of years ago.

Over the next few weeks, I asked Mr Small for an update almost every music class, but it wasn't till about October that we finally had a decision. Mr Small called another meeting, attended by a different set of people I didn't know, but the same core group.

"Miss Berry and I have thought long and hard about this, but we've finally decided -" there was a short drum roll - we had been waiting for months - then "- we're going to do 'Cats'!" Yay? What was that about? I'd never heard of it, and judging by the look on Mary's face, neither had she. "There will be auditions soon, but for now, rehearsals are on a Wednesday after school till five, and we're going to hopefully do some stretching until we get the scripts."

And that was how it all began.