Last weekend, on Saturday, it was Mer’s day, although she had a constraint. Mer is the junior high Academic Challenge team coach, and there was an Academic Challenge meet on Saturday. Academic Challenge is where teams of four students square off and answer academic trivia questions. This was a fairly big meet, with at least eight teams, including last year’s state champions, who sent an entire busload of students to the meet. By comparison, we had thirteen students total (although we had the best parent-spectator support, by far).

I got roped into being a reader/scorekeeper. I had expected to be a scorekeeper, working with Mer as a reader. However, there was a shortage of people to go around as readers, so they made everyone into both readers and scorekeepers. Also, normally teams use buzzers to buzz in, like on Jeopardy!, but the tournament was two buzzers short, so they put me and Mer in rooms with no buzzers. We just had people raise hands and yell, “Buzz!” It was a little strange, and made me a little anxious, but it worked out fine. I only had about five close calls in four rounds (with each round being about forty questions), and the students played along fine with the situation. It was kind of fun, although for the last round, as my voice was starting to fail from all the talking, the questions turned to Japanese writers. Someone was clearly having too much fun at my expense.

Mer’s students did well, with her “A” team going 3-1 for the day, and her “B” team placing second for their grouping. The meet let out at about 12:30, so Mer decided to take me out to lunch at nearby Legacy Village (the parents all took their children home, so we were free to go). We had an excellent lunch at California Pizza Kitchen, where we had a gift card we could use. We skipped dessert there, and wandered instead over to The Cheesecake Factory, where we each got a piece of cheesecake to go, which we ate outside since it was sunny. Mer did finish her piece in the car, as the wind had picked up and was a bit on the cool side when it was blowing.

In the evening, Mer and I got in the car, jumped on the highway, and headed east. We kept driving and crossed into Pennsylvania, and I had no idea where we were going. It finally occurred to me that we might be going to one of the colleges in eastern Pennsylvania where we have former CVCA students attending. That turned out to be the case. We ended up at Geneva College. We were there to see a former student perform as Alice, in a stage version of Alice in Wonderland.

Tiffany, Mer’s former student, was wonderful as Alice. She was able to convey childlike wonder and throw childish fits, and she was on stage almost the entire play. It was a joy to see her do so well. The production overall was quite good. The major actors did well, and the stylized action of the play worked. For instance, the man playing the Cheshire Cat always had a creepy grin on his face, and when he was seated, he would wave his leg back and forth to suggest a tail. It worked. Alice’s shrinking and growing early in the play was well done as well. When Alice shrank, stagehands came on the stage and lifted the furniture up so she could not reach it. When Alice grew, Tiffany subtly put on a huge skirt, and someone lifter her up off the floor.

There were a few things I would have changed, though. The tea party at the Mad Hatter’s was a great scene, but they used real tin cups and plates, and sometimes it was hard to hear the dialogue over the noise of the utensils. It probably could not be helped in the small theater, but some of the sight lines were poor, especially during the tea party. Mer and I could not see one or more actors during much of that scene. Lastly, there were two long scenes that involved the royalty in Wonderland (a trial in the first act and a discussion of queens in the second act), and I felt as if those scenes could have been edited down without losing anything.

The set was excellent, with a stone wall on one side that had card symbols in the stonework, and a huge tree on the other side that had cards and tea things hanging from the branches. Most of the action happened on the stage, but some of it happened on the main floor of the theater, and that is when the sight lines were poor.

Overall, it was a solid play, and I was delighted to get to see Tiffany perform so well. Mer’s and my discussion of the play made for a short seventy-five-minute drive back home.