![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
my life as a roadie
Yesterday I got to work at the bookstore (a job which I still am working on weekends, for reasons which I would like to pretend are complicated and noble but really just involve employee discounts) and discovered that I had about an hour to prepare for a storytime that I'd been volunteered for. It was a costume storytime, though, and that means the work that I have to do is pretty minimal. Help dress the coworker in the character costume, read a couple of stories, make introductions, take Polaroids, and hand out little keepsake things, that's my job on such occasions. This was a storytime featuring Clifford the Big Red Dog, so we had lots of stories to choose from, and I picked out a couple and got the camera and helped C./Clifford get dressed, and I made my nerve-wracking announcement (Attention B&N Kids: Clifford the Big Red Dog is here and he really wants to meet you!) and we headed into the children's department, which, if you know your Barnes and Noble, is in a section completely separated from the rest of the store.
And discovered an absolute mob scene. At least seventy kids, parents, grandparents, Clifford the Dog, who was immediately overrun, and me, who had to try and keep order. Who knew that Clifford was such a rock star? Not me, not C., not any of the managers. None of us had ever seen anything like it outside of a Harry Potter event--our storytimes usually draw a dozen kids at the most--and we were completely unprepared for it. I had to stand on stage shouting to read the stories, I had to keep kids from toppling C. over, I had to make sure she wasn't about to pass out, since those suits are like little personal saunas, and I had to placate everyone when tempers started to fray, as tempers are wont to do when you are dealing with upwards of a hundred toddlers and preschoolers. I used up six and a half rolls of film, not including the pictures I took when we ran out of film and somebody ran out to get more while the cafe handed out snacks and parents started passing their cameras over to me, and just in case you were wondering I could now load a Polaroid camera in the dark with one hand while facing sniper fire.
Which is more or less what we felt we'd faced when, an hour later, we regrouped back in the receiving room to get C. undressed. It wasn't the most imaginative storytime ever, or the most well-organized, but man, we felt we'd been lucky to survive it, and our manager felt badly enough to give us danger money in the form of gift cards, which I happily spent this very afternoon on a New York Times, a chai, and a copy of a book by my new boyfriend.
I feel that it is money well spent, and also money well earned, in service of Clifford the Rock Star.
And discovered an absolute mob scene. At least seventy kids, parents, grandparents, Clifford the Dog, who was immediately overrun, and me, who had to try and keep order. Who knew that Clifford was such a rock star? Not me, not C., not any of the managers. None of us had ever seen anything like it outside of a Harry Potter event--our storytimes usually draw a dozen kids at the most--and we were completely unprepared for it. I had to stand on stage shouting to read the stories, I had to keep kids from toppling C. over, I had to make sure she wasn't about to pass out, since those suits are like little personal saunas, and I had to placate everyone when tempers started to fray, as tempers are wont to do when you are dealing with upwards of a hundred toddlers and preschoolers. I used up six and a half rolls of film, not including the pictures I took when we ran out of film and somebody ran out to get more while the cafe handed out snacks and parents started passing their cameras over to me, and just in case you were wondering I could now load a Polaroid camera in the dark with one hand while facing sniper fire.
Which is more or less what we felt we'd faced when, an hour later, we regrouped back in the receiving room to get C. undressed. It wasn't the most imaginative storytime ever, or the most well-organized, but man, we felt we'd been lucky to survive it, and our manager felt badly enough to give us danger money in the form of gift cards, which I happily spent this very afternoon on a New York Times, a chai, and a copy of a book by my new boyfriend.
I feel that it is money well spent, and also money well earned, in service of Clifford the Rock Star.
no subject
(Speaking of which, I forgot to mention the high point of the day, which was the woman who appeared at a children's event dressed in embroidered red silk chinese pajamas held together at the front with a single black frog acrss the breasts. She was mesmerizing; we all agreed to this later.)
And! You are the mother of a toddler! This seems so hard to believe, that we have all been in fandom long enough to have seen full pregnancies and babies and now toddlers.
It's true, though, isn't it? Man.