December 4, 2023: Lessons Learned, Lessons Outdated -

Our high school graduation was at the Seattle Center Playhouse, which felt elegant. I was a speaker (not valedictorian, just one of three extras), and my speech was a fiery adolescent scolding about bullying and intolerance. It was aimed at a few specific people who I am sure did not see it as an arrow, meant to pierce their very souls. I had fun writing it.

We had an afternoon rehearsal, and then a break for dinner before the ceremony. We speakers were told to leave our speeches on the lectern, and so, of course, during that dinner break, the cleaning staff came in and threw them all away.

 And then it was time for the ceremony!

It all worked out, of course. BIG burst of adrenaline, upon seeing that clean lectern! Then I gave my speech, probably word for word, with a special, adrenalized fervor.

And I learned a big Life Lesson: Beware cleaners! And do not leave your only copy of anything behind!

Last night, I got to do a reading at our Lessons and Carols service to kick off Advent. Amazingly, I got the passage from Isaiah with All flesh is grass, and Every valley shall be exalted, and the nice, waltz-timed Say unto the cities of Judah: BEHOLD YOUR GOD!, and many other lines you have likely heard, or know by heart, or can sing, depending. (You may be singing now….)

I was thrilled to have been asked, and then I got nervous because it was like getting to do Hamlet’s soliloquy – everybody knows how it goes, what can I bring to it? So I over-rehearsed until the phrases started to sound clunky and odd, as if I had learned English from a machine translation. But –  wiser than my 18-year-old self – I had a printed copy of the text in my choir robe. And I didn’t need it, because the promised page was right on the lectern!

Today, I found myself wondering how it had gone, but reluctant to watch the video of the service. The reluctance stemmed from the time our 9^th-grade drama teacher decided to experiment with a zippy new technology, the video camera! (Okay, historians, not new, but new to him and his junior-high-school theater practice.)

He VIDEOTAPED DRESS REHEARSAL of our horrible 9^th-grade play, and then showed it to us the afternoon before opening night. No time to fix anything in rehearsal, because there WERE no more rehearsals. The video shook us all. My friend Steve kept saying, “That’s not my nose,” and my other pals and I discovered that we stood weirdly, or fidgeted, or had squeaky voices, or were way shorter than we thought, or -  in my case - all of the above. 

But despite my reluctance to discover an Awful Truth, I watched the video of last night. And there were no nasty surprises! Took me a minute to realize why: we are all now captured on video regularly. We KNOW our own look and sound, and our own odd mannerisms, and how our noses look. It might be a weird, vaguely unnatural sign of our times, but it’s also kindof cool.