Sophie Visits The Symphony

A few weeks ago, my company, Grey Seal Puppets, had the pleasure of being guest artists for one of the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra's Lollipop concerts. The Lollipop concerts are geared towards young children, and are designed to help kids learn and appreciate classical music.

Sophie came with Aunt Megan to see the concert. She enjoyed the music, and correctly identified some of the instruments. After the concert was over, we stayed on stage to greet some of the young fans.


Me with Sophie after the concert.


The Symphony's resident conductor, Alan Yamamoto


Sir Purr, the Carolina Panther's mascot, also made an appearance at the show. Sophie was a little shy of him at first...


But she warmed up enough to pet him. She talked about the "big kitty" for the rest of the day!

The concept behind the show was that Seemore Goodstuff (a character Drew performs on our local PBS station) and his friends were investigating the orchestra. They wanted to find out how all the different instruments worked and why the guy in front was waving the funny stick. In the process, we introduced the different families of instruments. One of the final pieces the orchestra played was called "The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra" by Benjamin Britten. The piece includes a narration which explains which instrument is playing when and what their voice sounds like. Well, since I read music, I was nominated to read all the narration. I had to follow along in a copy of the orchestral score (the narration was written inside the actual score). The piece was 18 minutes long! But it went well.

Most of the pieces they played were familiar or contemporary; "Escape to Neverland" from the movie Hook, "Theme from Peter Gunn" and "The Pink Panther Theme" by Henry Mancini were the most familiar. They ended the concert with a Sousa march, which was a lot of fun. And just being on the stage while the Symphony was playing was pretty amazing in itself.

Trick or Treat!

Halloween night we took Sophie to our friends Paul and Lanae's house to go trick or treating. Paul and Lanae's youngest son Parker is a couple of years older than she is, so he was able to "show her the ropes" on trick or treating.

The first couple of houses, Sophie was kind of shy and didn't really want to go up to the porch. (Almost all of the folks in the neighborhood were out on their front porches ready to greet the kids.) But after that, she really caught on. She started running from house to house, yelling, "Parker, come ON!" It was really cute.

Shortly after we got started, we were joined by Bob and Lisa and their two girls, Emily and Abby. Emily was dressed as Jasmine from Aladdin, Abby was Abu the monkey, and Bob even got in on the act as Aladdin himself.

As we headed back to Paul and Lanae's house to have dinner, she started singing "I love trick or treat, I love, I love trick or treat!" (This is sung to the tune of Mozart's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. I kid you not. She learned it on Little Einsteins.) So I guess that means she had a good time!

You can see the rest of the photos on our Shutterfly album.

Next time: Sophie visits the Symphony!