Kaia Block Shepard of Richmond is a
lucky little girl.
Her dad, Darren Shepard, is a marriage
and family therapist intern. Her mom, Karen Block, is the former director of
the Children's Theater program at Children's Fairyland in Oakland. She's the
center of their world and the light of their lives.
And to top it off, Kaia, who is 20
months old, has a whole slew of surrogate big sisters who adore her. They're
the kids who were in the program when her mom was running it. Now they're her
babysitters.
I talked with five of them: Katie
Roy, a sophomore at Merritt College; Alyssa Houston, a freshman at the
University of Hawaii; and the Love sisters – Ana, a junior at Cal Poly; Alli, a
senior at Oakland Tech; and Katie, a sophomore at Oakland Tech. And they all
love Kaia to pieces.
"I have a whole album of
pictures of her on my phone that I show to people all the time because she's so
cute," says Alyssa. "She's just a little ball of joy."
And Kaia returns the sentiment. When
Alyssa was back home over Christmas break, Karen drove Kaia to Fairyland for a
reunion, and Kaia kept chanting, "Alyssa! Alyssa! Alyssa!" all the
way to the park.
The girls – now young women – are
also grateful to Fairyland, especially the Children's Theater program, for the
difference it made in their lives.
"So much of what I am today
goes back to Fairyland," says Ana. "It gave me the confidence to be
who I am."
"It allowed me to imagine and
believe, and without that I would not have the motivation I now have to go into
teaching," says Katie Roy.
Every year, Fairyland chooses 30 kids
ages 8 to 10, both boys and girls, for the Children's Theater program.
They perform fairy tales at
Fairyland's Aesop's Playhouse, greet visitors to the park ("Hi. I'm Snow
White. Welcome to Children's Fairyland.") and serve as Fairyland's
ambassadors to the outside world by marching in the Oakland Holiday Parade and the
Piedmont July 4th Parade.
"They always warned us to
watch our step when we walked behind the horses," recalls Katie Love.
"But my favorite thing was the
jobs you got to do between rehearsals and on your lunch breaks," says Allyssa.
"Some of us helped feed the animals in the Corral, some of us painted flowers
on the little kids' faces, and some of us volunteered at the puppet shows to
make sure the little kids didn't cross the Magic Pink Line in front of the
stage."
Why?
"We told them that if they got
too close, the puppets would get scared and run off the stage, but the real
reason was if they got any closer they'd be able to see the strings."
And that, to me, is the heart of
the Children's Theater program: Big kids being nice to little kids.
"We just treated them the way
Karen treated us," says Alli.
Fairyland will hold auditions for
this year's Children's Theater program on Jan. 26 and 27. You can register
online at www.fairyland.org, and call
510-452-2259 for more information.
Your child will learn a lot of performing
skills. But more importantly, he or she will be entering a culture where it's
cool to be kind.
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