School play season. What performing teaches.

What happened next is what I want to describe. The teacher, standing in the wings, fed him the first word. He caught it. The words came back. He finished the narration. When he came off stage, he was crying — the specific cry of someone who has been enormously embarrassed and is waiting to find out what it means.

I told him: that was one of the best things I have ever watched anyone do.

He looked at me with the expression children have when they're not sure whether their parent is lying to them.

I said: you forgot the lines in front of two hundred people and you said sorry and you kept going. That is harder than remembering the lines. That is the thing that takes years to learn.

He wasn't entirely convinced. But he stopped crying, which was a start. He was the narrator. He had one job: forty-seven words in the right order. He stood on the stage and looked at the audience and all forty-seven words left his body at once. He stood there for what the parents' section experienced as approximately four hundred years. Then he said, in a completely different voice: 'Sorry. I forgot.' The audience — two hundred parents, siblings, grandparents — laughed. Not cruelly. With relief. Because every adult in that room had been that child once, in some version of the same moment.