My Fault. All my fault.

I love musical theatre. I have told people that my earliest musical influences were (in no particular order) Tom Lehrer, and the cast albums of West Side Story and Candide. Which explains so much, when I come to think of it. So of course, when Sarcasm Girl was a way wee, tiny thing (four, I think) we took her to her first Broadway show--Beauty and the Beast. Spouse had done some recording work with the kid who was playing Chip, so we got excellent seats, and a backstage tour. And from the moment the lights went down my squirmy four year old was rapt. Utterly respectful of what was going on on stage. And filled with the terrible light of one who has Found Her Vocation. I saw my first musical (Oliver) when I was seven, and had that same exact feeling, and we all know how that turned out, don't we? Since Beauty and the Beast the girl has seen probably a couple of dozen shows--most of them on Broadway, when we lived in NYC. She has good taste and withering sarcasm about things like, say, Cats, learned, I am afraid, at her mother's knee. And Emphatic Girl, who went likewise to see Beauty and the Beast when she was four, also loves musical theatre. And resents enormously that there are things her big sister has seen that she hasn't seen. She is particularly irritated by the fact that SG saw The Fantasticks twice in New York before it closed for good. "And I never got to see it ONCE!" she laments.

All this explains why, as we drove back from Santa Cruz this morning, we had the CD of Pippin on the car stereo, and the three of us were belting out everything from "War is a Science" to "Just No Time At All" in three part harmony. And why, as I was sitting here typing this, it made my heart swell with maternal pride to detect the final fanfare of "Make Our Gardens Grow" from Candide filtering down from Sarcasm Girl's room. I have without doubt corrupted my young, but I have corrupted them in my own special way.