Cowboy Joe

So - sports day at Ads' school. Or as they called it - Gusto - Field Day. Back when I was a small kid, which really, was not all that long ago (!), sports days were simple affairs. You had to take part in some races (egg-and-spoon, sack, plain and simple running, one-legged). You sometimes had to wear the white PT uniform complete with while canvas shoes and take part in a drill and marchpast. 1-2-3-4! The only "costume" you needed was maybe a few ribbons or a sash denoting the colour of the house you belonged to. You stood or ran in the sun for hours, drank some water, ate the packed tiffin from home, and tumbled into the bus for the ride back home. 

Now, they are elaborate orchestrated affairs, complete with specific themes, detailed costumes (for which I coughed up a few hundreds), umpteen rehearsals, and one helluva effort put in by the teachers. I doff my hat to them for all the initiative and creativity on display (and the fact that they didn't ask me to roam all over town to scout for costumes but instead made a bulk purchase!). Ads has been talking about sports day for the last month. He was selected to take part in a cowboy dance. Cotton eye Joe by Rednex - anybody remember that super-catchy song? He came home bearing his costume - battledress pants, cream full-sleeved shirt with a brown fringe waistcoat, a red satin cravat and a cowboy hat!
Saturday came around - a lovely, sunny day - and Y, S and I trooped to the school. Ads had left home an hour earlier. We sat on the front row and watched the marchpast, the musical drills and races, marvelling at the cute kids and their colourful costumes, entertained all the while by the running commentary by 2 teachers. They actually had 10 girls who were cheerleaders!!! After every routine, they would jump and dance on the field with their pom-poms. They did a wonderful job, but I have a major mental block when it comes to cheerleading, even when it is just a bunch of cute 5-year olds. The references (by the teacher-emcees) to the IPL cheerleaders seemed to me to be in poor taste. I'm sure I will have very mixed feelings if Y ever told me she wanted to cheerlead!
Ads cowboy dance was almost the last routine, and it was very very good. The steps and the synchronization were amazing. The funny thing was that just before the dance, S and I were trying to locate Ads. It was extraordinarily difficult to pick him out from a gaggle of some 60-odd boys, all dressed identically!! We finally found him and waved frantically until he responded and waved back, with equal gusto. 5 minutes later, he moved closer to us...whoa....he was some other kid!!! The joke was that S had actually zoomed in through the camera and confidently confirmed to me that it was indeed Ads :) So much for identifying our own child!
So what happened was that the dance had started as we tried to find out where Ads was, and we didn't manage to locate him until  the very end. By the time I ran towards him with the camera, the boys had done a smart about-turn and started marching away. Later, at home, I found that I had inadvertently clicked a snap of his without knowing that he was in the frame ;-)
It seems like he had fun, which is the important thing. Today I met his class teacher and she told me how, of all the kids in her class, she and the choreographer had to work the hardest on Ads because the dance and the steps did not come naturally to him. Apparently he danced well.......what do you know........we never saw it :(