we present Shrek!

 The Bubble of Shrek

a fellow director would often talk about the bubble

that holds and expands the magic of belief

when a show is coming to life,

she also warned that we should

beware the pin of losing focus,

34 middle school actors fill the bubble of Shrek,

brilliant with energy and positivity,

swelling with possibility,

full of themselves and their selves

as the community called Duloc and its surroundings,

12 middle schoolers craft the props and scenery,

4 middle schoolers stage manage so that all works,

sound, lights, costumes come together

to help the bubble to be, and to rise,

under the care of directors of acting and of singing,

all held within the wonders 

of stage-of-the-art technology and performing space,

the bubble fills,

the bubble rises,

into the house file those who have felt the bubble incipient,

and want to rise with it into the transcendence

that a good story, well-told, can work upon our souls,

a village comes to be,

something new, a musical, is born,

opening night is like a long-awaited party,

all of a sudden the curtain opens,

the show presents itself,

and the audience embraces the whole

with joy, appreciation, laughter, applause, smiles,

those in the seats recognize and embrace what’s happening,

and their empathic energy resonates within the performing

so that the bubble swells to fill the theater,

each of us: actor, audience, enabler,

pulled out of the prison of the individual

into the open courtyard where we know and love the other,

and all of us together are held in the expanding bubble,

we believe, we enjoy, we enlarge, and hold, hold,

for a time both brief and beyond time,

enchantment plays by different rules than the clock,

our collective heart lives for each bubble of belief that we can create,

people of Shrek, way to go!

the bubble thrives within your care.

by Henry H. Walker

February 11, '22