The Girl has loved performing for years. She doesn’t often have an audience, but she really doesn’t need one.

On a weekend trip, she can entertain herself in the hotel room dancing about as if she were on the biggest stage in the world.

She can dance a little reel on the way from the table to retrieve a spoon for little brother’s soup as if she were part of a touring dance troupe.

A hairbrush can be a microphone and the hardwood floors throughout our house make every space a recital hall.

This weekend, though, it was a little different. It wasn’t the improvised routines that fill her week with little joys as she imagines herself on this or that stage. It wasn’t plunking away with her piano teacher. It was an auditioned role. A practiced and prepared role. And it wasn’t just her: it was almost three hundred kids across the state, all practicing with their music teacher after school, learning the same songs in big city schools and small rural schools. Students of multiple ethnicities, races, religions, and mental aptitudes with one thing in common: an ability to sing. A gift in common. A gift they are willing to share.

And in the midst of all this, like magnets to a pole, two Polish families found each other and the girls made friends instantly.