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Day two of auditions. I am really glad I decided to break auditions up over two days. Doing them all at once would have taken way too long. After they were done, I stayed for another half hour or so sifting through the papers and trying to decide who would fit best in what role. There's this whole problem, as a teacher, of trying to decide whether to give a part to the best actor for the role, or the most deserving child.

I have a lot of kids who could really use a little self-esteem boost. I have one, in particular, whose mother called to talk to me about his gender identity issues and wanted to know if I could encourage him to join the play rather than getting involved with a group of girls who weren't such good influences on him. I also have a darling young man who is just learning English and made the effort to get a copy of the script ahead of time so he could learn his part prior to auditions. These kinds of things change the way I look at kids when I'm auditioning them and it skews the process. I guess all auditions are skewed in some way or another, whether it's nepotism or casting couch or whatever... but I always feel stressed out by the process because I want to be both FAIR and RIGHT and it's really hard to be both.

I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings.

I hate knowing that I have.

And posting the cast list tomorrow is inevitably going to hurt someone's feelings. Probably a few people's feelings.

I post the list purposely on Friday afternoons and then hide in my office so that the kids will go home and have the weekend to cool down or whatever they need to do before I have to deal with them again on Monday.

(PS: I decided to cast both the ESL boy and the gender-identity boy. Not fair, but I think it is right.)

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