A growing experience...

I guess that's what I had signed up for, at the very least. My regular readers (all four of you ;) ) were probably hoping for some outlandish celebration sounding like "oh yeah, we nailed it, we were the bomb, a-ma-zing!" While it was good, and many people have told me so, not all went super well (cue to my being overly critical).

Andrew's show started at 3pm. There were a couple of satellite schools going before his group and it was fun watching young kids doing their karate stuff on stage. I'm talking about mostly white, yellow and orange belts showing their knowledge to parents and brothers and sisters, very cool. Andrew's group's turn eventually came and they took their spots. They went through some stretching, some pushups and regular stuff they do in class. They then did a bit of sparring techniques and the group was split in two so that 4-5 kids at a time would do their latest kata. Andrew did the Statue of the Crane kata and I thought he did it well, one of his best rendition of it so far. Kudos to him for having worked on it hard.

They then went to three individual performances by kids in his group: one bo kata from a kid who's taking class with us, one open form with music from a girl and Andrew's bo kata. This was a pretty special setup as this was the only group that had individual performances. All of the other shows only featured group showing or special in-between individual performances from selected athletes, like Emilie Paquet or Elymaud Samson, both world champions in their own rights... Andrew's kata went well even though he almost dropped his bo twice. Sounds kind of weird to say it went well with two possible drops, but seeing him on stage is something I never thought I'd see, so that was huge. One of his near drop (the bo touch the floor but he awkardly caught it before it rolled away) happened in the new sequence we put in just a few weeks ago and the other happened during his throw but honestly, a shiny bo is the last thing you want to throw, spinning, while standing under some red and green spotlights. I got to experience that first hand later on... Anyway, I'm really, really proud of my boy. I'll have some videos for you later on this week.

As for me, since the show in which the adults were performing was starting only at 6, we got back home, ate a quick bite and I got back for 5:45 in order to practice a bit. My wife, son and parents all arrived a bit later. I was one of the last one to go on, but I didn't know beforehand, so I warmed up a few times during the show in order to be ready. To be honest with you, I wasn't super nervous while waiting to go on. Preoccupied is more what I would call my state of mind. Preoccupied about how I would be able to handle my new bo, especially its shinyness under the lights. Remember, I received that bo only back on Friday, and from the picture of it, I'm sure you can see that it is very shiny.

Anyway, my name got called up to take the stage and again, I wasn't super nervous. I saw that as no more than performing my kata in front of my fellow karateka friends on a Monday night. For that, I gotta thank my Monday instructor, Jonathan, for his initiative of letting me do just that, test drive my kata in front of my friends.

The kata in itself went well until about two third in, nope not during the throw, that part went well, but just after, in a "routine" figure 8 move, I hit my right knew with my bo and up it went flying to the ground. I picked it back up and finished my kata as if nothing had happened. As the title states, it was a growing experience, for both of us. I saw my son showing the first signs of nervousness, as if he was realizing that this was something special. I think it's a sign of growing up that he realizes that it was something big. I even have him on film, doing some "air bo" (à la "air guitar") when he was sitting in the background while some lower belts were performing their group thing. On my side of things, even with the drop, I realized after a month of practice, that performing in front of people is no different than doing it by yourself. You gotta do it first for yourself, then others are simply watching you, living it through you. This should help me immensely, first in future competitions, then when will come the time to test for my black belt. Controlling the nerves in any kind of showing is alwasy very important...

I will also have a video of my performance at some point, although you'll have to make do with my wife's weird performance at framing the kata at least until the video of the whole show is released by the school. She got so enthralled watching me that she forgot to follow me with the camera and at one point, sadly the part where I perform the newest sequence of my kata. Oops. :) I'm laughing about it now, but I wasn't too happy about it last night... As I said, they have filmed all four shows and they will be released for sale a little before the Christmas break as a fundraiser for the school. You can bet that this is one DVD I'm very much looking forward to owning and viewing... :)

FM