It's always the same Saturday afternoon.

They say that raising kids is an ongoing series of surprises, but sometimes our interactions are so predictable, it seems like we're reading from a script, and the same script every week.  Yesterday afternoon was our little family to a T.

Months ago my thoughtful, imaginative, and socially conscious wife had set up a birthday present for me, and bought us all slots in the Berkeley Rep's "Back to School" day at the Pixar studios, having only a sketchy idea of what that actually entailed.  The morning of the big event comes and we all get up knowing only that we have to be there Promptly at some Time to get our pick of Activities.  The Time we had was a little off, so for us Promptly meant getting there an hour before they opened the gates.  By the time they did open the gates, the tension and excitement in the car were oozing out the cracks in the doors.

We park in the studio lot and join the streaming throngs headed for the front door.   Knowing it would be wrong to tear hell-for-leather past everyone else, Who-concert style, I suggested the strategem of happily skipping as a way to increase our speed.  Of course that made me think of the "We're Off To See The Wizard" step that Anne showed me a long time ago, which was kind of stupid to try in that context because you cover no ground at all with it, but just as I was trying to get the step up to speed, my giant size thirteens got in the way of Frank's and sent him skittering across the pavement.

Or that's what he'd have had you believe at the time.  All he did was drop to one knee, and it didn't even draw blood, but he was wearing shorts, and it was concrete, and all of a sudden instead of making haste for the registration line we were stuck with a non-ambulatory but very loudly crying child.

Fortunately, he's only sixty or seventy pounds and not much more than four feet long, so I picked him up and the three of us made it the last fifty yards to the door, and inside, and picked our classes, and had a half-hour to roam the halls of Pixar before the first one.  But Frank is now Crippled.  The knee may look only bruised, but apparently it's been dealt its final blow, because  it won't bear any weight at all.  He makes a big show of hopping about on one foot, but it's clear he's Not Going Anywhere, certainly not on a hushed and respectful walk through the hallowed halls.

Here's were I start to lose it.  I've been going on adrenalin all morning, but I'm fried from the week, and I start to consider just going home.

Oh, but I didn't mention which classes we picked.  You get to pick two out of about half a dozen.  We got into the Animation class first, since that involved sitting in a theater watching a software demo, we figured he could deal with that.  After that, Anne wanted to take Acting, so she signed up for that, but I wanted to get Frank and I into Stage Combat.  I was certain he'd like it--we stage light-saber fights at home, we'd be able to practice what we learned together, it would be pretty rigidly structured, none of this "now be a tree!" or "draw what you feel" stuff.  But no!  Anything but that!  Please, please, don't make me take Stage Combat!  Anything, I'll take the Playwriting class,  I'll  do Crafts, anything but that!  Not only was he sure that his ability to stand on his right leg was forever gone, but I could sense there was another, more terrifying issue, that I couldn't get him to talk about, but afterwards I asked him and he said he thought we were going to start with crossbows.

I think he might have meant quarterstaves, but you get the picture.  If you imagine signing up for a class involving carrying a iron-and-oak crossbow that's as heavy as you are, carrying it into a line across from a bunch of other people with their crossbows and having to wind, load, aim and fire it into a bunch of other people doing the same thing at you, your negative reaction to the idea would be as strong as his was.

So anyway, Anne leads him away and manages to get him interested at looking at PIxar art before the first class, leaving me to wallow in my foul black mood.  The animation demonstration was cool.  After that, of course he loved the Stage Combat class. Five minutes into it he was bouncing on his heels, like a tiny, skinny-armed, white, blonde-haired Muhammed Ali.  I had to pull out the big guns and threaten him with the cancellation of a trip to his cousin the next day, and I have to give him credit for actually pulling himself together, but afterwards he couldn't wait to show mom our new three-punch-and-a-hair-pull choreographed fight scene.

By then my own mood had improved, and I was able to enjoy the day, which really was a blast.  Pixar has a really amazing campus.  It was a beautiful day, and a lot of fun. Just emotionally exhausting.

Also like us, we're very suggestible people, in the car on the way home Frank says "Let's make some more stop-action movies when we get home!"  So we spent the rest of the night working hard on some good film making. This is a draft, only the first two scenes, and we still have to add dialog, music, and special effects sounds (yeah, right).  I think I made it at too high resolution, so it might stutter on your computer, but that's an artifact of the flash-embedded video Vox uses, I think.