Dragon Tale

Above all...dignity.

Last week on Father's Day Kiernan went to see a play, a production of a show called The Legends of King Arthur performed by the excellent Creative PlayGround. Legends was written by a good friend of mine named Karen Hardcastle and it tells the tale of the important symbols in the lives of King Arthur and Queen Guinevere. There are three actors in the show, and those three actors play a variety of parts. The actor playing King Arthur just plays King Arthur. The Guinevere actress plays a couple of parts. The actor playing Merlin plays Max the Dragon and Sir Sagamore, in addition to Merlin.

Above is a picture of the Merlin actor doing his Max the Dragon bit. As Max the Dragon the actor must recruit a couple of kids from the audience to act as his tail. One of the hallmarks of Creative PlayGround shows is that audience participation is not only encouraged, it is vital to the success of the show.

The week previous to this Kiernan had gone to see the Creative PlayGround production of Ferdinand the Bull, one of my favorite of their plays. Kiernan has seen this play every year since he was born. He has a copy of the book with cast signatures from each production to prove it. On the occasion of that show, last week, Kiernan elected not to participate. He was not interested in volunteering. I understood this completely. I don't like volunteering for stuff in public either. For an actor I can be fairly shy. While he is quite a showman, and much more socially apt than I am, he does have a shyness that shows up from time to time.

I was delighted when, this week, he expressed interest in participating in the show. I assured him that playing part of the dragon tail, while an important part, would not require him to do a lot. So he said he'd like to do it. When the time came to volunteer he was rarin' to go.

He did a fantastic job.


[PIC NOTES (top to bottom): 1. In the middle of the Max the Dragon scene. 2. Preparing to go on as the tail of Max the Dragon with another audience member. Her name was Rebecca. There is a fairly long scene as a young Arthur woos a young Guinevere while Max and the tail kids wait offstage. A couple minutes into the scene Kiernan said, sotto voce, "Come on. Come on. Let's do this already." 3. Max the Dragon and tail making the entrance. 4. After the show with the cast. Aaron Hendry as King Arthur. Elizabeth Tobias as Queen Guinevere. I never got the name of the goofball playing Merlin. If you look closely you can see the three important dinosaur companions Kiernan brought to the show.]