Senior Arts Night

As I leave Whipple’s lobby, recently transformed by singed senior paintings and brake pads reborn as sculpture, I gulp down the remains of my makeshift Arnold Palmer and amble towards the third floor of Fogg. It is Senior Arts night. Each year, I know something will amaze me in this kaleidoscope of senior expression ranging from the comical to the nostalgic to the moving. I enter our slightly tired Upper School study hall to see it gratefully returned to its original purpose: as a space for performance. I remember that we will be painting walls and adding new carpet in Fogg this summer – I bet the kids will like that. Next year’s kids. A bit tired from what has been a truly long day in B-D, I plop myself into the first back row seat I can find. I try to be as inconspicuous as a Head of School can be with only three weeks until graduation. This is their night, after all.

Watching the stage mystically framed by waning sun streaming through stained glass, I am struck by a number of things. Upper School Director Shiela Esten is here, having offered an inspirational speech in assembly earlier this week. She has recovered all of her mobility in just a few months after her stroke. She is not one to miss Senior Arts night. As I survey the balance of the room, it becomes clear that I have goofed. I must be sitting in the student section – behind the seniors. All the other parents and teachers have gravitated to the other side of the room. Like an unspoken rule or magnetic force field, adults seemingly honor the space and time they need with each other. Perhaps Heads of School are immune to such forces. I should probably move. But as I glance around the senior throng once again, crowned by low riding hats, flashy sunglasses, and well used Berwick athletic gear, I can’t help but wonder what they are feeling inside. I overhear someone I taught in eighth grade saying that she feels sad. But when I ask a young man next to me if he is ready for graduation, he quickly replies, “I can’t wait.” Stung slightly, I hear this enthusiastic response as nothing more than “I can’t wait to get out of here.”

Parents stroll by and a few say hello before the show starts. The first has his last Berwick child graduating, and he laments the reality that empty nesting is upon him. I tell him he is always welcome to come back to Fogg for a good intellectual debate, and he thanks me. A second parent approaches me and also shakes my hand. I say “can you believe he’s graduating?” The only answer I get in return is a pump of the fist, as if to say “Hallelujah. We made it.”

The show begins as Mr. Harding lurks incessantly throughout the stage area, tweaking volumes and balancing sound to make his students sound great to the end. I think this is his favorite tradition of the year. I hear someone sing for the first time in public, and she is breathtaking. Later, rock guitar riffs emanate from an electric blue stratocaster that has been dormant since eighth grade; its owner has not lost his talent. He has simply become more adept at making it look like he is not trying. There is poetry, there is dancing, and there is techno. There are knock knock jokes and Broadway and Taylor Swift and U2. There are couples and there are friends and there is joy. There are nerves and there is anxiety. I wonder what is really going on in the heads of these young people, still trying to appear like they have it all under control.

As the performances role forward, one more powerful than the next, I realize my desire to catalogue the emotional state of these young people at their senior arts night is nothing but a reflection of my real quest to understand my own alchemy of feelings: exhaustion, amazement, wonder, pride. I recall conversations in eighth grade Ethics with a few, and yet I wonder if they will even remember their Head of School. Looking up to the grand ceiling of Fogg, I smile, remembering that we were finally able to have it painted two summers ago. I no longer worry that white chips will flake to the carpet like snowflakes in May. This is a good thing.

As my gaze returns to the stage, I know that the ambiguity and the emotions – for them and for me - reflect the reality of the moment. These are young graduates on the teetering precipice of adulthood; they are ably prepared and yet guaranteed neither happiness nor success. But for the moment, they do have this room. They do have this music, this place, and they have each other. And I know that this will be enough to pull them through the weeks and months that lie ahead. And I know that it will be enough for me as well.