A pretty sweet Scarecrow

Sarah, your blogging begging has not been in vain.

Here we go...back to the Wizard of Oz and Miss Carina... Carina came into auditions wanting to be the scarecrow and like Sam, completely nailed the audition. I quickly realized that Carina is one of, if not the most naturally gifted kid I've ever worked with. Her instincts on stage are almost unbelievable and her expressions are well...
...priceless. As I looked through picture after picture of the show, I couldn't stop laughing because there wasn't a moment on stage that she wasn't completely animated and in character. She has such a laid back personality that when things went wrong, she was the kid I could count on to fix it. She was the kid that was going to laugh if something fell apart, not get stressed out. She was the kid who was going to recover a line that got dropped. She was the kid who would just sing her song, loud, clear and on key, and do the dance with it and rarely miss a step.

And she and I connected quickly. When we had a discussion about whether or not she'd ever done theatre before, which she hadn't, and she told me that she wouldn't do theatre very often because she loves soccer too much, I just smiled.
This is the only picture I have of her with her hat on. It wasn't ready for her on opening night.

Carina is one of the smartest, most mature kids I've ever met. I know there isn't a thing in the world she's found that she isn't capable of doing and doing well. But she still had that sweet silliness that kids have. She was my reminder to laugh when things were funny. She's the one who when I was getting frustrated because of the giggling fit all the kids were having said, "Miss Jen...laughter is contagious you know," and then kept right on laughing.

One of the best things that I'll remember about this show is the friendship that she and Dorothy formed. Off stage, they became those characters. Just two people who had known each other for such a short time, but had a friendship that appeared to have been decades old. When Carina would leave for the day it wouldn't take Alexis 5 minutes before she'd say, "I miss my friend. I wish she'd come back." And they were just always happy being together. One day when Alexis got overwhelmed and started crying saying she wasn't sure she wanted to be Dorothy anymore, Carina was right there. She didn't say much (at first) but was just there with her. When I said, "Alexis honey, you've got to go be Dorothy because so many people are looking forward to seeing you. And people are looking forward to seeing Carina. If you don't go on stage, Carina won't get to either and people want to see how talented you girls are."...to which Carina said, "I love me! I'm awesome at this!" And we all just laughed.

Carina's is one of the personalities I miss the most on a day to day basis. No matter what she could always make me smile. I knew that if I walked in the theatre, without fail, she would smile really big, run up to me and give me a huge hug. She was always ready to work. When we had our Juneteenth celebration and the kids got to play at that all day she came up to me at 5:00 and said, "Miss Jen can we start rehearsal now?" She always wanted to do Act 1, Scene 8...her main scene, even though we never needed to rehearse her because the minute you told her how to do something she had it down.

When her mom told me on the last day that Carina had said, "Mom, I really want to come to this camp next year, " I'm pretty sure that I didn't do a very good job of containing my excitement. I can only hope we're that lucky.