Elphaba For A Day...

I've always wanted to play the role of Elphaba, so when the French National Honor's Society at our school announced their "Have A Laugh And Help Sudan" fundraiser (embarrassing teachers for certain quantities of money donated), I was all over it. We have a sister school in Sudan where, a few years ago, no girls attended school at all. Now there are 600 of them! Throughout the year, we've had various fundraisers and drives----everything going strait to that little village. A brilliant Social Studies teacher at our school runs the foundation and goes there every year. We raised about 3,500 dollars with this fundraiser and 9,000 or so with a 5k walk in the fall. For $950, I was willing (okay...I was excited) to paint myself green for a day. I ended up having far more fun that I could have imagined...especially when I got to scare the Little Raptors (a preschool on campus for teachers' kids). They squealed and screamed and probably had bad dreams last night! Here are some pics...

Here I am with Martha Riley, the Social Studies Teacher who runs the project for our school. She wore her wedding dress from 30-something years ago for the occasion! See http://www.projecteducationsudan.org/ for more information on the project.

Kelly Snell, the Dance Teacher/Performing Arts Chair/Student Council Advisor and I went in on this together. She dressed as Glinda, the Good Witch...complete with bubbles and whatnot, while I acted her counterpart. She and I are both obsessed with WICKED and already have tickets to see the touring company when they come to Denver in October.

Several of my theatre kids stopped by my Spanish classes that day because they heard about what I looked like and just had to see it! Taylor, a very talented Junior, was one of them. She was our lead in "Thoroughly Modern Millie" and plays prominent roles in the children's show I'm directing now.

I tried casting a spell on Jacob...it didn't work. I'm not so sure my students were able to take me very seriouly during class that day. I mean, would you respond to a green-skinned witch if she asked you to start conjugating stem-chaning verbs?

I carried a broom around all day...naturally.

I experimented a lot with my witchy hand movements...for when I get to actually play that role. You know, character exploration...
While this is a hideous picture of me, I felt it necessary to give credit to my makeup artist. Brandon Bill is the theatre teacher at our school and he and I have worked together to direct all the shows this year. He's brilliant in all aspects of the craft, and particularly good at makeup. We got to school at 6:15 so he could help me become convincingly green!