Heaven. I'm in Heaven.

"Where did she get that dress?" asked one.

"What are those?" asked another.

"They're ostrich feathers," I said.

The movie was not something I planned. After a long Saturday out, I came home, flopped in bed and turned on Turner Classic Movies. The kids shuffled in and piled on the bed around me. I was not sure that they would like a black and white musical, but it was a huge hit.

The first scene in "Top Hat" is Fred Astaire in a stuffy men's club in London. He makes too much noise with his newspaper and when the grumpy old men glared, the kids twittered. When he left the club he did a loud tap dance on the marble floor while the old men in the club looked outraged. The kids whooped. I knew then that the movie was going to be ok.

The plot is a goofy mixed identity story that had the kids feeling like they were in the know since they knew who everyone really was. When the butler dressed as a gondolier fell in the canal I saw the exact moment that Frank figured it out. "Ha!" he said. "That's the butler!"

"It's like in that Shakespeare play with the brother and sister," said Anna.

"Twelfth Night?" I said.

"Yes. Where people are in love with people and don't know their true identity."

So just when I was feeling like "Top Hat" was an old movie, my daughter reminded me that theater was around long before anyone thought to put ostrich feathers on a ball gown.

I Want S'More

There is a girl in M's Girl Scout troop that lives in a foster home in our area. Her life as she describes it to me is divided between "When I went to School X" and "When I started going to School Y." She has some pretty serious problems that are visually apparent - distant and odd and carries a ragged towel around with her at age 9. She has few boundaries and discusses things like her medication and her bed wetting as if they are everyone's business.

"I don't think that she needed to tell us about the bed wetting," said my daughter on the way home from the meeting.

Nope. She didn't. But these girls did not say a thing to her about the bed wetting. And for that I could hug every last one of them. They have taken this odd looking girl and brought her into their group. I saw them reach out for her in a game this weekend where she was standing by the sidelines and it was not instigated by an adult. This came from 9 year old girls who saw someone from their troupe standing on the outside and they pulled her in.

At camp we had dinner in the lodge and then the girls did a few more games and then we made S'mores. Y'all have had those, right? I thought everyone had. There was a huge fireplace in the lodge and the camp director loaded up the fireplace during dinner so that afterwards we had piles of embers, which make the best toasted marshmallows. The girls loaded up their toasting sticks and headed for the fireplace (a few leaders were helping regulate the number of girls at the fireplace) and roasted their own marshmallow and then put the marshmallow on a Girl Scout cookie that has chocolate on it.

I watched our girl and realized that she didn't know how to roast a marshmallow. I stood at her side and encouraged her to hold it over the embers and we watched it brown up. She picked up on when and how to turn it. She watched the girls next to her and caught on quickly. Her troop mates complimented her evenly brown marshmallow and of course some extolled the virtues of a burned marshmallow. When it was toasted, she held it up and I showed her how to sandwich it between two cookies. Then she took a bite of toasted marshmallow, melted chocolate and cookie. The look on her face? It was incredible. And I nearly cried. Over a S'more.

I think the paramilitary thing is slightly creepy, but I love the camraderie that I see build in these groups. Sometimes the activities seem a little dorky to me. I have to remind myself that I am a cynical 36 year old and that there are 9 year old girls who have to be encouraged to be part of a silly game and they have to be instructed on how to roast a marshmallow. And for that I am grateful that the Scouts are there and that my kids are a part of it all and that they are learning the values of friendships and inclusion. These are the values I want them to have and I feel fortunate to see them developing.