By Friday afternoon, after a long week in the second grade, I am very much ready for the weekend. Once I finally see Gaga’s silver car approaching me in the carpool line, I am excited knowing I’m going to perform today. Once all of my siblings get home from school, we are going to eat dinner and perform the greatest show yet.
My siblings and I have been planning our program all week. The programs always take place in the playroom of our house, which gives us enough space away from our parents to dance and sing. Sometimes we record our shows on my sister’s ipad, in case we decide to post our productions one day. We usually have to delete the program videos after we record them. They are over an hour long, so they take up a lot of storage. Other times we only perform for my parents, but this doesn’t happen as much. We perform every week, so they’ve already seen a lot of our best shows.
We start to pick the songs for our program days in advance. Really we only perform pop songs, but we are open to accepting song requests. I think most of the songs we like to perform come from Ariana Grande and Taylor Swift. Sometimes we use Miley Cyrus songs, or even that one song Replay by Zendaya. We perform that song really well.
Finding the right music is only one of the ways we have to prepare for the program. We also have to decide who is going to sing lead, and who is going to be the background dancer. My sister, Ellison, thinks she is good enough to be the lead singer, but she isn’t even five yet. She isn’t ready to be a lead singer. I think she is much better at being the background dancer. She does gymnastics, so she already knows how to do cartwheels and flips off the couch. My brother is always in charge of the lights and music. He is not physically in the program, but he is the most important person production wise. We need him for multiple reasons. Drew, my brother, makes sure to turn off the strobe lights and disco balls during each song change. We also need him in case our microphone, attached to the old karaoke machine, stops working for some reason. Our programs take a lot of work.
Drew is usually the last person to get home on Fridays after school. We are too tired and hungry to do them right after school. Drew says we also need to wait for the sun to go down, so we can fully see the disco lights. After we eat dinner, then we will be in rehearsal mode.
Dinner comes and goes, so it is time for setup to begin. I need to go through my closet and look for something more fun to wear. It’s important not to wear a lot of layers because we are dancing and singing for an hour straight. It gets really hot in there, and we don’t stop the program unless it’s absolutely necessary.
Next, I have to talk my sister into being the backup dancer. Every time it takes more convincing than the last.
“But can I just sing this one song?” She asks me.
She always wants to sing the best songs. I usually let her sing a verse or two in the microphone so she won’t get mad and storm away. She has done that a few times before. Our programs aren’t as good without a backup dancer, so I’ve learned not to get on her bad side.
After changing my clothes and talking to my sister without starting a fight, I watch the sunset out the window and I know it’s time. We are officially ready to perform.
“Testing…testing.” I say into the karaoke microphone. I normally sing a whole song or two before starting the performance. This gives Drew time to make sure the disco lights are plugged in and working, and Ellison has time to stretch for her gymnastic tricks. If everything goes smoothly, we are ready to start.
The lights are off, the music is ready. My brother sets up the Ipad. He is about to press the “start” button for the video, while also making sure not to get in the camera frame.
I am the star of the show! I think to myself, in those few moments before my brother hits the record button. I have the responsibility of singing for the next ten songs, with very short breaks in between them.
It takes a lot of work being the lead. But, after many performances, I am confident this is going to be a breeze.
“3…2…1 go!” Drew says.
I open my mouth to speak to our returning audience, initiating the funnest hour of my week once again.
***
In this recollection of performing “programs” with my siblings, I tried to situate myself back in my seven year-old headspace. When I thought about what emotions these memories brought back, I remembered frequent arguments with my sister over the singing role, and how serious these performances felt at the time.
The most difficult task when writing as my younger self was resisting the urge to over-explain, as I wanted to prove why these moments meant so much to me. I attempted to write in a similar fashion to the memoir Solito, which was written from the perspective of a nine-year old boy named Javier Zamora. He decided to write his memoir–not from his current perspective as a writer in his late twenties–but from the perspective of his nine year old self. Instead of being the person who’s had therapy and time to process his trauma, Zamora’s memoir illustrates his thought process at the time of the trauma. Zamora was just a little boy trying to make sense of the world around him, as he is making a life-altering journey alone from El Savador to the United States.
Zamora successfully avoided using his current knowledge to reinterpret his experiences as a child. Instead, he simply describes what he saw and how he felt at the time. He often allows his observations of the physical world to reveal key details about his well-being. For example, Zamora makes sure he “looks at everything: the pattern of cement under our feet, the detail on the front face of the church, what people wear, what people say…(175). He “notices people’s eyes” and “if they look at us funny”(175). In his memoir, Zamora doesn’t explicitly say he was experiencing feelings of anxiety and paranoia, or trying to deal with the symptoms of trauma, because he didn’t know that at the age of nine.
With time to reflect on these moments, I think our programs were some of the fondest memories I have from my childhood. We wanted to make these videos solely for our own entertainment, and I find it endearing how we thought others wanted to watch us basically sing karaoke on steroids for an hour straight. I tried my best not to over explain why we performed programs, because at the time I didn’t really know what made it so fun and memorable.
Although writing from the perspective of our past selves limits the amount of knowledge we can share, it can still be advantageous to write from this perspective. According to Reading Autobiography Now: An Updated Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson describe the different “narrating I’s,” as a tool for autobiography (174). According to the authors, different narrating I’s can emerge when we try to write from the perspective of our younger, past selves.
In some instances, the ‘narrated ‘I’ is a less sophisticated, younger, or more naive version of the self (Smith and Wastson, 174). Writing from different perspectives allows us to try and recreate a moment in time. If Zamora experienced the seven-week journey at nine years old, then describing these moments as a nine year old could make the story feel more authentic. His age was pivotal to how he experienced and processed the traumatic event. In a less significant way, being the ripe age of seven years old was pivotal to my enjoyment of programs.
Works Cited
Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography Now: An Updated Guide for
Interpreting Life Narratives. 3rd ed., University of Minnesota Press, 2024.
Zamora, Javier. Solito: A Memoir. Hogarth Press, 2022.
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