Principal for a Day!
I got to be Principal for a day at Joyce Kilmer Elementary School again this year on October 29th. Principal for a day is much more fun than it sounds. For the one-day principal, there is no paperwork and there are no disciplinary duties! It’s just the great pleasure of meeting faculty and students at this terrific local school. At 8:30am after breakfast with the staff, I was asked to lead the school in the Pledge of Allegiance over the school audio system. I don’t think I’ve recited that pledge since I was in grade school, so I consider it miraculous that all I left out was “indivisible.” More successfully, I shared emcee duties with Principal Miguel Trujillo for the Hispanic Heritage Month assembly. I wish I’d had the camera for all the great work the K-4 classrooms did for this show. Dances, songs and enacted biographies! The auditorium was packed with classrooms and the balcony was packed with parents and younger siblings.
Kilmer is our closest neighborhood school and we have have provided residencies and professional development to Kilmer and numerous other Chicago Public Schools for almost 20 years. We have great admiration for the Kilmer team and are proud to be their neighborhood partners.
Halloween!
Lifeline did three off-site shows on Halloween (yes, in ADDITION to the shows at Lifeline!)
Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle performed at Gesthemane Garden Center‘s annual Halloween event. There was a tented stage in between the pony rides and the petting zoo and a huge crowd of kids and parents seated on hay bales. As always, the show went over great! Thanks to John, Ellen, Amanda, Gillian, Rachel and Scott for their spectacular performance.
Lifeline also provided entertainment at the 2nd annual Jarvis Square Halloween celebration (a Rogers Park Parents event). Long-time Lifeline collaborator Jacqui Krupka (aka Happy the Medium) had a constant line for fortune telling and palm reading in the window of Charmer’s Cafe. Right in front of Gruppo di Amici, Elizabeth Dowling (currently Pig in Dooby Dooby Moo) and Bryan DiLoreto (caballero in Zorro TBC) worked feverishly to inflate orange Lifeline balloons for all the kids while also collecting names for our mailing list and talking to people about Lifeline in their spare breaths. I took a little break inside Gruppo and ate some delicious potato gnocchi and watched them. It was a fun neighborhood event with many businesses participating: 400 North providing bags of popcorn, Greenleaf Art Center providing hands-on arts projects and Rogers Park Bark setting up a complicated yarn maze that the kids adored.
And Lifeline went to the South side, too! Phil, Jim and Shole appeared at the Glessner House Museum, performing Tales of Madness and Revenge. These adaptations from Edgar Allan Poe stories were performed to capacity crowds at 5pm and 8pm on Halloween. Mwaaahahahaha!
It was a big day for Lifeline, culminating in dragging our props and tents and helium tanks back into Lifeline’s lobby during the 2nd performance that day of Treasure Island and quietly re-storing stuff around the building. The pirates make a lot of noise so it was not hard to be stealthy! Thanks to all who contributed to our successful splintering of ourselves all across town!
Dorothy Milne
Artistic Director