"The Day the Earthquake Hit"

A few weeks ago we were able to attend the Grand Premiere of two operas. I have never actually attended an opera before, so I was pretty excited, and the fact that Ben was starring in it with the rest of his 2nd grade class made it even better!

The 2nd grades at Thomas Edison Charter School create, write and star in their very own original operas every year. Its part of a program called OPERA by CHILDREN. This year the theme chosen was Weather...she said she figured there would be operas about snowflakes or dancing leaves. Nope. The first class's opera was called "Tidal Wave of Ice Cream" and involved ninja warriors, dragons, mermaids, mermen and princesses trying to save a ship full of ice cream from a tidal wave and crossing over burning lava (the ninjas kept burning their bare feet) to warn the mermaids.

Ben's class did "The Day the Earthquake Hit" which chronicles the effects of a terrible earthquake cracking the jars in the school science lab and creating weird weather. If your familiar with the book Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, you have a pretty good idea of what it was about. In this scene the scientists are mixing up a potion to make the weird food weather stop and fill the earthquake cracks in the earth. The magic potion creates a bunch of dust devils that come suck up all of the food mess. We had a blast and so did Ben as you can probably see in this clip.



By the way, Ben says this opera is a "smooth" opera because they just sing normally. I thought that he was using real music terminology, but apparently Ben just made it up.