On Saturday, I was in the Ark in Temple Bar for Story Spark. The Ark is Ireland’s only theatre set up especially for children. I was doing a ‘talk’ with Joe O’Brien for kids aged 6 to 9 years old – though it ended up with both of us doing more arsing around than any serious talking.
Joe suffered a mishap before he went on, as he fell asleep down in the green room (that’s what they call the room where performers in the theatre wait to go on stage). While he was asleep, his imagination got out of his head and scampered upstairs to interfere with my very serious and educational talk. I was getting the kids to help me design a character who was ‘mad, and a little bit bad’ – the title of the talk. Joe’s imagination (who looked a lot like Joe, but wearing silly clothes and weird paint on his face) caused some degree of chaos until he was caught by security and returned to Joe’s sleeping skull.
Our character was finished amid the confusion, made up of a fat head, a fatter body, bushy eyebrows, ‘swollen eyes’, Wolverine claws, and a ballerina’s feet. He was called Twinkle-toes.
Joe managed to make it on for the end of the session to talk about his Alfie Green books and to apologize for his imagination’s poor behaviour. And he denied the scandalous claim that the bizarre character the kids had designed looked anything like his mother-in-law.
As part of the promotion for the Story Spark events, Sarah Webb and I were interviewed last week by Ireland AM on TV3 – you can see that piece of video on the TV3 site.
