By Tim Leeds
Living waxworks returned to the Havre Central gymnasium at St. Jude Thaddeus School Wednesday and Thursday.
The students from Joyce Hellman's fifth-grade and Alma Seidel's eighth-grade classes stood still as statues, in costume, at displays for the historical characters they had chosen.
"It was really kind of a living history lesson," Seidel said.
The students chose a figure from history, then spent about a month working on the costume and set and researching and doing a write up on the figure. Hellman and Seidel said the research and writing was all done at school, but the making of the costume and set was done mostly at the students' homes.
"It becomes a parent project too," Seidel said.
She said a major part of the project was choosing what character to pose as during the wax museum display. The student had to be able to dress as the character as well as be interested in who or what they chose, Seidel said.
The students performed the museum twice, from 6:30 to 7 p.m. Wednesday night for the general public and from 9 to 9:30 a.m. Thursday for the rest of the St. Jude Thaddeus students. Seidel said they do it for a half-an-hour, with short breaks, because that's as long as the students can pose perfectly still.
The gymnasium was full of the displays, with students spread across the floor in full costume. The characters they chose ranged across time and the world, including Hawaiian princesses, the Statue of Liberty, Mark Twain, Jeanette Rankin, Louisa May Alcott, Benjamin Franklin, Sacagawea, Teddy Roosevelt and Norman Rockwell.
