Parent Power, Power Parents - SchoolBook Somehow she found herself directing the fifth-grade musical at Public School 29 John M. Harrigan, the elementary school in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, that her son, Dean, attended two years ago. Besides the show, Ms. Stapinski wound up producing an article that she titled "The Munchkins Are a Problem: One Mom's Struggle to Direct the Fifth-Grade School Play." SchoolBook has been rolling the article out in installments on Fridays, as a weekend treat for readers. This week, rehearsals are under way and it is set-building time. "We have to block the show," Gina, my co-director, says to me one wintry afternoon. There are six inches of snow on the ground. Paulina, my daughter, wants to go out and play in it, but we have to go to rehearsal. There's no time for fun. I have only one question. "What does "block the show" mean?" "I thought maybe you knew what it meant," says Gina, shrugging and smiling. Miss Nancy, one of the fifth-grade teachers, has gotten involved. She implores the kids to use jazz hands during the Emerald City dance. Jazz hands! Jazz hands!" she shouts, reminding them. Now she's the one who gently suggests that we need to "block the show." I call my husband, who used to be in high school plays, and ask, "What does it mean to block the show?" "It's basically who stands where during the non-musical parts," he says. There is a pause. "Why are you doing this?" he asks once again. I hang up. So the blocking begins. I can't even get stage right and stage left correct in my head. But I am blocking a play. I keep telling them I have no idea what I'm doing, but they just keep giving me new jobs. We set it up so that all characters enter and exit from only one side of the stage at all times, to keep things simple. We make lists of those kids" names and post them in the wings. Then we just keep moving people around on stage until it looks right from a certain distance. Then we put tape down so they know where to stand. This, I realize, is blocking the show. You don't need to be a rocket scientist. I find there is a long staircase and multiple landings rising up and down from the stage wings. Downstairs leads to the cafeteria, to Richard and his chocolate chip cookies, and upstairs leads to a dark, scary dead zone with a giant wind turbine from the days when the building was heated with coal. Those days, amazingly, were just a decade ago. This is where we store the costumes that one of the other moms, Sally, has begun designing. It's dusty and creepy up here, and still smells like coal, but it is also quiet and peaceful, and I find that I want to stay and not go back down to the noise and the chaos. So I linger. Sally is the mother of the mayor of Munchkin City. She has to come up with 90 costumes - many of them glue-gunned and made of felt. We all gather in her living room one Saturday to help. I cut and paste the gray and red Winkie costumes, while Dean and Paulina are out gallivanting with all the other kids somewhere in the neighborhood. Sally has been sitting for a neighbor's rabbit all weekend. The rabbit's name is Grasshopper. She tells me in confidence that the rabbit has died, unexpectedly, and that she's not sure what to do about it. So far, she's being pretty Zen about poor old Grasshopper. "The rabbit was fine the first day," she says, as she cuts out Winkie spearheads from hard cardboard. Yesterday he looked kind of listless. And then today, I went to feed him and he was just dead. I ask, cutting a Winkie tunic. "Oh yeah, I'm sure," she says. His head was bent over to the side and he was drooling. Does the neighbor know? I ask. Not yet. What do I do? I mean, it's like 90 degrees in my neighbor's apartment. It's going to start to smell in there. "Maybe you should put it in the freezer," I say. After I leave, one of the other volunteer moms helps Sally put the stiff dead bunny in a box. Sally's children, who have been bothering her for a pet for several years now, are completely horrified and no longer want a pet. "I guess you could call it a silver lining," she says. We spend other Saturdays building sets with Todd and a bunch of brawny dads and a few tough moms in the cafeteria. Todd is a perfectionist and is worried the children will ruin his creations, so he decides not to let the kids help. Why should kids get to build sets for their own play? But when Todd is not looking, I let Paulina help me whitewash a picket fence for the Kansas scene, just like Tom Sawyer, but she soon grows bored and goes to run through the empty school with Sally's younger daughter, Alice. The two are very bad influences on each other. At each rehearsal, Paulina and Alice disappear for hours and hours. I have no idea where they are, and have no time to figure it out. At my urging, and practically at gunpoint, my husband volunteers for set-building duty one Saturday. He helps put together the farmhouse, which is designed by a developer dad named Carlo. When Carlo's son, Thomas (the Scarecrow), asks if he can help, Carlo and Todd chase him away. It takes all day for the adults to build the house, and when they are done, it is free of any kid imperfections. It is a small architectural masterpiece. "It has a neat spring," my husband explains when he gets home. It falls over, onto the witch's fake legs in Scene 2! It's really great," he says. I can't believe I helped build it. I feel so manly. He flexes a bicep. He is catching Oz fever, I realize, which may help quell our arguments. Todd has designed three canvas backdrops. They are initially painted by Miguel, Toto's dad, an actual fine artist. He even mixes paint like a painter. The details are later filled in by a multitude of artisan-parents. Glinda's mom, while painting, says that her mother was an actual fine artist as well, "from the Abstract Expressionist school." My father was a Teamster. I help paint the rows of crops in Kansas. I pour green glitter onto the Witch's Castle/Oz backdrop and the Wizard's little shower-curtain hiding place, which Todd has built from plywood. The back of my neck becomes covered in green glitter, which won't even come off in the shower - the real shower back at home. I also help with the yellow glitter on the Yellow Brick Road backdrop, the most beautiful of the three, which has rolling green hills and that yellow road unfurling toward the horizon. Some days I look at it and long to climb onto that road myself and skip off into the distance, away from all these loud children and generous parents. It's quite breathtaking, this backdrop, especially once Todd gets it mounted onto the rolling tracks at the back of the stage. But first I have to help him grommet the thing. I have no idea what the word grommet even means. My only exposure to it is in the Wallace and Grommet series. Until now, I thought "Grommet" was simply the name of a Claymation dog. But I realize they're spelled differently. It's Wallace and Gromit. I soon have a crash course in grommeting and do an awfully good job, if I must say so myself, pounding holes into the canvas and then smashing the metal grommets around the holes with a hammer and some weird metal grommeting tool. All my anxiety and frustration over the Munchkinland scene is relieved by pounding those grommets into place. The process is just like those white doughnut-shape stickers you once put around the page holes in your binder to keep them from ripping. Except these are much bigger and are made of metal and will keep the backdrops from tearing off the back wall of the stage. I feel like I've actually accomplished something when I am done with the backdrop. And I can now add "grommeting" to my list of resume skills, beside "blocking," "glittering," "directing" and "dead rabbit counseling." Todd is also creating two action sequences, one involving an animated, moving tornado that will grow bigger and bigger on the horizon of Kansas. This will be accompanied by sound affects - my job. The other special effect involves projecting the head of the Wizard (Dean, my son!) onto one of the closed auditorium curtains. I have my doubts that Todd will actually be able to pull this off, but I am encouraging, since I want very much to see Dean's big head projected onto a big curtain. But I'm still not sure how Todd's going to go about doing this. I don't ask, lest he yell at me, too. Todd still doesn't have a job, so he does have plenty of time to figure it out, though his wife would rather he be spending that time finding employment. Arguments ensue. Eggy, real name Edward, the other Wizard, has a very talented mom, an illustrator who has designed children's books and rock star album covers. For the production, she's painted seven-foot tall standing backdrops of nasty trees. They are quite beautiful. Some of the other parents have also helped to make three tiny, thatch-roofed Munchkin houses for the Munchkinland scene, which of course, musically, is never going to come together. Maybe people in the audience will be so charmed by the little houses that they won't realize what a mess the scene is. When the assistant principal sees the sets and the Kansas house with its trick spring, she starts to worry. Maybe we're putting too much work into the show, that the sets will outshine the children. She says this to Gina, who then calls me in a rage. Can you believe her? We're making the sets look too nice! What does that even mean? "The Board of Ed is used to mediocrity," I say, calming her, a strange role I've taken on lately. I think if you raise the bar for these kids, they're just going to reach higher. Of course, this is not what I really believe. I worry - and have nightmares - that the opposite is true. "Thank you," Gina yells, to my false optimism. Thank you very much. Next week: Conjuring the ruby slippers.