Inspiration at a Lip Sync Show

Inspiration at a Lip Sync Show

We do it every year. It gets the students inspired to walk across that stage, perform, and have fun. It gets the parents and staffulty (faculty and staff) fired up. It causes more than one belly laugh. It’s a great night of fun that makes our school the center of the community.

Our Lip Sync Show has gotten increasingly more popular since we started five years ago. This year was no exception. We had the most acts and attendance ever. The students started putting their acts together weeks ago. The level of talent was the best it has ever been.

It was a night when half of our staffulty and about 500 attendees showed up in the auditorium with anticipation of a great show. The talent included anywhere from the Muppets to MC Hammer. We had acts that spanned decades from Waterloo and It’s raining Men, to more contemporary acts like Barbie Girl and Harlem Shake (clean version).

If I had to choose a winner, (no easy task), I could have guessed any ten of our twenty acts could have been in the top three. I would not have been surprised with any of them being a winner. Luckily, we had judges that were left with that task.

As principal of the school, I had the opportunity to perform and do a little, light co-hosting. One act, however, did stand out in the eyes of the crowd. So much so that the act was given a standing ovation. This was the first time any lip sync act at our school had that distinction.

The very last act is always a staffulty act so the judges and MCs have time to calculate the scores and get everything ready for the “BIG” announcement. As time flew by, the acts grew better and better. The next to the last act was the one, as an educator, we all wait to applaud.

The act was performed by a brother and sister. It  not only took courage but took a lot of leadership to prepare and perform. The act was a takeoff from Glee’s version of Born This Way. The music started and all eyes were on stage. The two students strolled out with jackets and removed them a few bars into the song.

The boy’s green t-shirt read: AUTISM, and the girl’s read: LRC. These two t-shirts reflected the students’ placement in our middle school. More importantly, these words spoke to the crowd that these adolescents were comfortable in their own skin. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house as the choreographed routine got the audience moving. For those three minutes, everyone felt a connection to those kids and their world.

At the end of the routine, the students kicked beach balls off the stage that had words written on them. These words were adjectives, nouns, and verbs that were self-descriptions of the two students. The balls were batted around the theater gently, and then were tapped back on stage.

The older sibling in the act displayed her leadership ability during the entire routine. She also displayed many of those character traits that make up great leaders. Many students wait around for someone else to take the lead. When they do that, they are stifling their own leadership ability.

Every student in your school and our school deserves to be on that stage multiple times during their school careers. I am glad I was there to be a part of this performance.

And, oh yes, they won the competition as they received a standing ovation from our community.