Skip to main content

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.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Piercing the Bubble

This week we were so fortunate to have former NH Senator Kelly Ayotte address grades 7 – 11 in our theater about Civil Discourse in a time of Political Polarization. Senator Ayotte spoke to the need to take the high road in tough conversations and put an incredible primacy on building relationships with people who hold different opinions. She was able to speak to some of her own successes in working across the aisle to develop legislation to address the opioid crisis in New Hampshire as one powerful example of how this can be possible. Additionally, Senator Ayotte offered a strong reminder to our students of the need for more women in positions of leadership within our government, citing that she had only been the 53rd woman to serve in the US senate during her tenure. With a down-to-earth style and but an appropriately impassioned call to action, she challenged our students to become the leaders that they could be. Her call to action and example of service were powerful reminder...

Designing the Revolution

As Berwick parents know, we made a decision to use our professional day for 2015 to attend the National Association of Independent Schools conference, which happened to be in Boston this year. Given that this event usually comes to Boston once per decade, it was a unique opportunity to expose our entire faculty to the national conversation at independent schools. When we scheduled it a year ago, the decision to close school on February 27 and bus our teachers to Boston seemed like a no-brainer. After four snow days this winter, I must admit that it seemed a bit more audacious as the actual day approached. Most of all, I want to thank our families for allowing this to happen. The experience turned out to be remarkable on a number of levels. I was honored to be a part of the “Think Tank” planning group in Boston, which landed on a theme of Designing the Revolution for Independent Schools. This theme spoke to a combination of innovation, design thinking, and new leadership required f...

Behind the scenes

I often like to use the word authenticity when talking about Berwick Academy. I have said that I feel more able to be myself at Berwick than any place I have worked to date; it truly is a gift to feel that way. For parents, we usually focus on the teachers and coaches who make our kids’ lives so dynamic, and we forget the people behind the scenes who make the Berwick experience possible: maintenance, custodial, food, transportation, and support staff, etc. Berwick could not deliver the program it delivers without such high quality yet largely unheralded work. The same could be said of the Head of School. I am quick to point out that being a father is far more humbling than being a Head of School. There is no way on earth that I could have possibly moved this school forward without the unquestioned support of my wife, Amy. I often marvel that, in addition to dealing with a husband who can be tired and grumpy at the end of long days, she somehow has managed to catalyze the amazing...