January 11, 2021: Upbeat Interlude

A former student, now a high school teacher herself, invited me to address her Musical Theater elective class today, to talk about choreographing high school musicals. I choreographed high school musicals for 30 years, so I’ve got experience and a lot of opinions to share.

I built a slide deck, and had more fun doing that than I may ever have had in Powerpoint. 

The moment of  hot dog beauty is from Susan Stroman's work on Bullets over Broadway.

These other photos are from Clackamas High Productions, and I know they are blurry, but I'm throwing them out there because they are just plain fun. 

This afternoon, the students were delightful, and they participated, so the whole experience was grand AND distracting from other things. 

Second upbeat thing: that little feature where the New York Times lists words that are appearing for the very first time in the paper included the following today:  pseudocopulate, pseudocopulation, pseudocopulating, and pseudocopulated. It is but one tiny click to find out what article these are from, and yet I did NOT click it, because I so want it to be from a review of "Bridgerton."

The fact that we had pseudocopulate as verb form and pseudocopulation as noun made me think about whether we were declining of conjugating, which made me think about conjugal, which made me think I should just move on.

And I got a thank-you from Pizza to the Polls, because we sent money to them so that they would bring some pizza to voters waiting in long polling lines for the general and for the Georgia Senate election. It occurs to me that this tiny act of benevolence may have been the most effective thing we did in the whole election season. Maybe we kept some tired and hungry people in line long enough for them to cast their votes. It’s possible. Also, I like the idea of providing pizza for strangers, and I like thank-you notes in general.

Finally, you know how there have been some companies deciding they will no longer send campaign contributions to the sedition coalition of the Republican party - the legislators who decided, even after they’d had to shelter from the mob, to vote to overturn the legitimate results in several states? Well, among other companies, AT&T and Comcast have pledged to stop funding those sedition folks henceforth. 

This is great news! I inherited about two months' grocery money of AT&T stock when my parents died, and I was thinking oh, gosh, now I have to sell it and buy something ethical. But if they aren’t going to fund seditionists, I don’t have to do that! Woohoo! More free time!

Okay, that’s it for upbeat! It was fun!