change the world

Happy Earth Day. I had some really fun plans for today but Mother Nature rained me out. The irony, I tell you. Hopefully the kids-y/nature-y stuff I was going to take my sisters to will be rescheduled for next weekend.

When I was a kid I was always writing and directing plays. My friends were the stars, and we went through days and weeks of memorizing lines, rehearsing, planning scenery and costumes, drawing up blocking diagrams . . . only to never put on the play. Maybe we just lost interest in it. I can't really remember why we never took my plays through to completion, but I remember that not one of them - and there were many - made it to an audience.

One summer I bought (or perhaps my parents bought for me, shitty memory!) a play kit that included two plays, a marquis to write your production information on, and some other crap to keep kids out of their parent's hair using the arts. One of the plays was called "Be Kind to your Mother Earth," and while I wasn't a die-hard environmentalist, I decided that other one was stupid and that this would be the one.

My friends and I worked and worked and worked on the damn thing. We turned my backyard into a stage and decided where the entrances and exits would be. But we never put it on. The funny thing is, while I no longer have the play or anything else associated with it, I do have a cassette tape of myself at that age, talking about the play and how it was going to change the world. Yes, everyone who came to see it (who, should the play have been produced, would have probably been a grand total of five or six) would be inspired and would turn around and inspire others, and then we would all start recycling, or something like that. (Screw Haley Joel Osment, those Pay It Forward bastards stole my idea.)

Kids are so idealistic. I wish I still woke up every morning wondering how I was going to change the world that day.