Drowning in Pink!!!

Today we have been PINK!

In fact, we have been Pinkalicious!!! If you can imagine an auditorium full of girls, all dressed in as much pink as their little bodies could physically withstand and decked with enough pink jewels, from tiaras to rings and necklaces to outdo even the worst dressed Oscar attendee, then you'd be close! You will probably be pretty amazed to know that young Miss Beehive actually had little pink bling!!!

A local Breast Cancer Charity was holding a musical event based on the kid's book Pinkalicious to raise funds and can I say now, as a disclaimer......I am really glad it was for a great charity and am very happy and keen to support and what I am about to say has nowt at all to do with the Breast Cancer Organisation, but to do with the fact that kids activities (in general as we have discovered a lot recently!) are not always that well thought through from the kids' perspectives - ok, so that said......

Well, this has become one of Little Miss Beehive's most favourite books ever since she had it bought for her some months ago.......to the point she can recit it and tells me when I do the naughty trick of trying to speed read and miss out bits 'cos I......Am.....So....Bleedin'......Bored of it now!

So naturally, being the kind mama I am, thought she would love to see it as a musical.

We took our friends along to it. These friends were innocent and untouched by the snare of Pinkititis until today. For that, Claire, Heather, I apologise profusely! Well, ever since we knew we had tickets I have had her asking is it now, is it today, is it in a minute, is it this year?????

So, back to this neon pink room full of all shades of pink -magenta, fuschia, pale pink, peach pink, lurid bright pink, shocking pink, salmon pink, Pink Popsicle, Marshmallow Bunny, and Tickled Pink.......add to that, high energy fever and some pink cupcakes............it made you realise why the colour so often associated with hell is red.............cos it is so feckin' close to pink!!

After the show - (imagine lots of adults pretending to be children, the recorded music coming through the same speaker as the singers, thus drowning them out, and several seriously off pitch notes.....yeah I know I am a mean old critic, but you had to be three to appreciate it in its full catawauling!!) - there was an "after show party" - for the kids.
Well..........by the end of the show, most of the under fives had had it. They needed to eat! So Claire and I sought out the queue for the pink cupcakes (what the heck - why not?!) only to discover that in the infinite wisdom of the organisers, there was one person selling these to a room of 650 people, of which we were round about number 356 and 7!!! Needless to say, we had to play mean mothers again and remove our now melted wrecks of daughters (particularly mine, she is somewhat partial to her snacks at the exact time of day and woe betide if you cannot produce!) from not only the lengthening queue but also the small room in which they had chosen to squash us all for eating, face painting, craft activities, nail polishing and meeting the cast.....................
I do seriously wonder if when these things are organised for kids, the organisers ever actually associate the fact that there will really, truly be children at the event? It should be set up so that there is:

• more haste involved in the food department ie: more than one person who doesn't understand American currency, can count past 10 or can even see the money, on the till would be a start or, better still, someone stuffing a cupcake into each child's mouth as they leave the auditorium!!!
• more space in the craft activity department, so you actually go home with a craft on paper, rather than the remnants of someone else's on your clothing from when you tried to breathe in and squeeze past for the umpteenth time while trying to find a: the food, b: your child, c: the bathroom or d: a combination of all them.
• more than one person doing the activities such as face painting or nail polishing that takes at least 5 minutes per child, so therefore creating a queue out of the door and, after the food queue are always the longest!
• And moving activities that involve long queues ie: food and face painting into separate rooms from each other so that mothers are not scrapping with each other in front of their kids 'cos Sydnie was in front of Priscilla in the food queue, but actually Priscilla thought she was in the nail painting queue but this wasn't discovered until several clumps of hair have been won by each team!

Right! Now I need to detox myself from this horrific experience. Apparently, according to my pals, I still have "The American Girl Doll" experience to look forward to............Woo Hoo..............can't wait

NOT!