As anyone out here will tell you, islanders wear many hats. Isle au Haut’s first selectman also teaches physical education, works at the island general store and does various other jobs around town. The school’s ed tech also works at Black Dinah Chocolatiers and serves as the town’s tax collector.

It’s a fact of life. There are fewer people to bear the burden of running a town; everyone is forced to take on more responsibility.

While this saying applies very obviously to adults, I often forget how it applies to the children as well. It has never been clearer to me than when preparing for the upcoming school play.

The teacher wrote each of the school performances I have been involved with in the past—and they were written with having only four characters in mind (one role for each of the four boys in our one-room schoolhouse). But when you try to do a larger scale performance of a familiar holiday tale, A Christmas Carol, for example, things get a little messy.

The boys had their hearts set on performing the Dickens classic story, and even though Paula, the teacher, did her best to adapt the play to suit her limited number of actors, you can’t get around the number of characters that are crucial to the plot. There is Scrooge, of course. There’s also Marley and the three Christmas spirits. But just as important to the plot are the Cratchit family, the nephew, Scrooge’s sister and his ex-girlfriend. Each of the boys took on multiple roles and I was tasked with performing each of the female parts.

As we were rehearsing, we realized how difficult it was going to be to pull this off as a live performance. Multiple roles per student mean more lines to memorize, more frantic costume changes in the wings of the stage and more stress. So we adjusted. We decided to turn the live performance into a movie and have spent the last two weeks filming and editing.

I couldn’t help but smile as I typed out the credits that will scroll through at the end of the movie, the same names appearing over and over. Being an islander means taking on more responsibility”¦. even if you’re 12.