10

The play is only a couple of days away, and I have no idea how we're going to pull this thing off. First of all, nobody has bothered to learn their lines, and that's all Mrs. Norton's fault. During rehearsal, Mrs. Norton whispers everyone's lines to them from the side of the stage. I wonder how it's going to go next Tuesday when Mrs. Norton is sitting at her piano thirty feet away. Another thing that's screwing everything up is that Mrs. Norton keeps adding new scenes and new characters.

Yesterday, she brought in this first-grader to play Dorothy's dog, Toto. But today, the kid's mom came in and said she wanted her child to walk around on two legs, because crawling around on all fours would be too "degrading." So now we've got a dog that's gonna be walking around on his hind legs for the whole show. But the worst change is that Mrs. Norton actually wrote a song that us trees have to sing. She said everyone "deserves" a chance to sing in the play. So today we spent an hour learning the worst song that's ever been written.

Thank God Rodrick won't be in the audience to see me humiliate myself. Mrs. Norton said the play is going to be a "semiformal occasion," and I know there's no way Rodrick is going to wear a tie for a middle school play. But today wasn't all bad. Toward the end of practice, Archie Kelly tripped over Rodney James and chipped his tooth because he couldn't stick his arms out to break his fall.

So the good news is, they're letting us Trees carve out arm holes for the performance. Tuesday Tonight was the big school production of "The Wizard of Oz." The first sign that things were not going to go well happened before the play even started. I was peeking through the curtain to check out how many people showed up to see the play, and guess who was standing right up front? My brother Rodrick, wearing a clip-on tie.

He must have found out I was singing, and he couldn't resist the chance to see me embarrass myself. The play was supposed to start at 8:00, but it got delayed because Rodney James had stage fright. You'd figure that someone whose job it was to sit on the stage and do nothing could just suck it up for one performance. But Rodney wouldn't budge, and eventually, his mom had to carry him off.

The play finally got started around 8:30. Nobody could remember their lines, just like I predicted, but Mrs. Norton kept things moving along with her piano. The kid who played Toto brought a stool and a pile of comic books onto the stage, and that totally ruined the whole "dog" effect.