The Show | Barry Wheeler, ND

A giant mechanical puppet made of colorful interlocking pieces, suspended above acrobats in a darkened arena — February 21. The puppet was maybe thirty feet tall.

We took the kids to a show — a touring theatrical production, big production values, the kind of thing that fills an arena and fills it well. February, a Saturday evening, which meant getting there early enough to find parking and late enough that neither of them melted down from hunger.

The thing I was not prepared for was the scale. There was a puppet — a marionette, maybe thirty feet tall, built from what looked like colorful interlocking pieces, like something architectural and alive at the same time. It moved on cables above the stage with this deliberate, weighted rhythm. Performers in blue and red and yellow moved around it. The crowd went quiet in a way that crowds usually don't.

Two acrobats performing on a high wire suspended in a bright square frame above a dark arena — The high wire act. The crowd held its breath. So did I.

The high wire act came later — two performers in white, working a wire suspended maybe forty feet up inside a illuminated frame. No nets that I could see. One of them climbed onto the other one's shoulders. The arena was completely silent. Adalind was gripping my arm. Jaxsen was leaning forward in his seat with his hands on his knees and he didn't say anything for the rest of that sequence, which for him is unusual.

Afterward, in the car, he said: "How do they practice that without dying?" Which is genuinely a good question, and I didn't have a satisfying answer. We talked about it most of the way home.

Adalind fell asleep before we got to the freeway.