Over the Weekend

I had some fun over the weekend -- quite a few of my former students from Rehoboth Christian HS in New Mexico reconnected with me on Facebook. I had a great time walking down memory lane. After this many years have gone by, even bad memories tend to gain something of a nostalgic glow.

Except for one in particular -- one of the students I had on the track squad, and his younger brother and sister were students of mine, died in a car accident not long after I left teaching. Another former student told me about it at Calvin College; I remember thinking that they never teach you in teacher school how to deal with the death of one of your kids. But recalling that gave me the chance to e-mail his sister copies of the three pictures I had of David Charles when he won a medal at the State Track meet in 1987. And that's how I remember him, a wonderful kid running his heart out to win that medal for a tiny school way off on the west side of the state.

A "bad" memory that now is just pretty funny was the time we put on the musical The Sound of Music. The director and the music director did not exactly get along (which I'm told is always the case) and it fell to me to build the sets and figure out the set changes, and how to fit the production onto a makeshift stage inside the dining hall. I spent hours and hours in the school shop every night getting things ready. I knew early on that I was going to have to eat, drink, and sleep "sound of music" if there was going to be a chance we would pull it off the way it deserved to be done.

In the end, it all worked. I did a great job making use of anything and everything that was at hand. I figured out a way to make a backstage area by tilting the dining room tables on end and supporting them in place with milk crates and concrete blocks. They worked very well as walls. And my set change crew was great--they were every bit as into making the musical work as the performers onstage.

But then I was asked to take the show on the road for one performance in the middle of nowhere, to make it work someplace I had never seen. All I'll say is that we managed, but it was years, and I mean years before I could sit through The Sound of Music again.

More tales at another time.