This year�s festival for the pint-sized and underaged among us has an educational bent. Gone are the hippy-dippy yoga classes and finger-painting tables. This year�s Kiddie Limits goes beyond what your kids have experienced on the fringes of Festival Beach. It�s taking your kids to the School of Rock.
Every child�s musical education begins with singing and dancing along with the performers onstage, and this year�s Kiddie Limits stage is well-stocked with players for the occasion. Local mom and folkie extraordinaire Sara Hickman, the only female act on this year�s kid stage, kicks things off Friday morning with her humorous and sensitive music for kids of all sizes. She�s followed by the BummKinn Band, a hillbilly trio that makes music for tiny Clampetts. Daddy a Go Go (stay-at-home-dad John Boydston) offers up chatty, bluesy tunes emphasizing good nutrition. Wrapping up the inaugural day�s events are Paul Green School of Rock Music All-Stars, exemplary students from the string of schools that inspired the Richard Linklater film starring Jack Black. The dudes continue their rule over the weekend, with San Francisco�s trippy Sippy Cups and their psychedelic puppet shows that leave kids jaw-dropped and enraptured. The country-fried, ecology-minded Farmer Jason (Jason Ringenberg of Jason & the Scorchers) rounds out Saturday�s bill, but watch out for that chugging tractor! Adding another element of cool to the proceedings is young rocker-cum-young dad Ben Kweller, with a late-afternoon 15-minute slot.
On Sunday morning, local wunderboys We Go to 11 show off their burgeoning Southern-rock chops for those who are awake enough to listen at that decidedly un-rock & roll hour. A fitting denouement to the Kiddie Limits experience, Ziggy Marley offers a chill-out set before passing the … mic to Paul Green�s All-Stars. Finally, Jellydots regales the post-lunch crowd with their high-energy tunes about bicycles and other profoundly mundane things.
In between sets of grownup and kid-oriented music, the small fry can attend such workshops as Learning to Rock 101 with Paul Green and Girls Rock in a Man�s World, whose antifeminist title and the dearth of female performers are something for your daughters to discuss with cousin Autumn, a women�s-studies major visiting from Vassar. Other topics include songwriting, shredding, and rocking the rhythm section.
If your kid�s a more tactile learner and would rather touch than listen, be sure to check out the G-pod, a rock-instrument petting zoo sponsored by Gibson guitars. To look the part of a nascent Johnny Rotten or Pat Benatar, the wee �uns can get punk rock hairdos and (temporary) tattoos.
Got a wiggle-worm in your brood? He or she might be interested in working off some of that excess energy at the various dance workshops on hand. Kick it like Run-DMC at the breakdancing workshop led by B-boys and B-girls, or get it on like Shakira in the Latin dance class. Break it down in the hip-hop workshop and John Fitzgerald�s drum circle. Having worked up an appetite, shop at the HEB�s snack shop, whose proceeds benefit Anthropos Arts, a local organization providing comprehensive music education to disadvantaged students in the Austin area. Class dismissed!
This article appears in September 14 • 2007.