The official purpose of my visit was to go see Oooooooooooook-LAHOMA in its debut performance on the Woodberry stage, but even if there were no shows to see I would still try and visit every few months because I like the people so very much (and with three month intervals between visits, they are both excited to see me AND remember who I am). I had dinner in the dining hall to take advantage of the delicious food (I gave terrible looks to students who didn't appreciate having prime rib- "again"). There is also never any lack of Woodberry news, and I was entertained with many a snarky story.
The production itself was fantastic. I had never seen Oklahoma! and was expecting it to be a dry 1940's musical. In reality it's quite innovative (it balks a lot of musical traditions that I had been under the mistaken impression it had started) and the cast was having a lot of fun with it. I didn't realize until the end of the show that a couple of students (who had been on tech crew last year) gave me shout-outs in their playbill bios. One said something along the lines of "special thanks to Houyoux [edit: my predecessor as tech director] for teaching me everything I know about tech, and also to the god among men, Mike Johnson." I was both touched and pleased that he accurately attributed all tech skill teaching to not me.
Friday afternoon, before I left, another Woodberry alum (who also helped out with Usher) played an organ recital that was open to the community. He did a number of beautiful pieces and ended by DESTROYING Bach's Prelude and Fugue in C Minor (less impressive version here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFW7bk_oQ1Y) . Very cool.
As I left the Forest once again I got an e-mail from one of the guys in my class- someone who I hadn't talked to since reunion. It was a group e-mail to a number of us who used to be involved with "The Pariah," which was the underground (often highly inappropriate) literary magazine that only existed for our senior year. Attached was the greatest thing that we (or maybe not me- you have no proof that I was involved) ever published: a letter from an angry parent (of a boy who got kicked out for lying) which we proceeded to mark up and edit as though it were the first draft of a 9th grader's English essay. The general tenor of the note was that they were far too important, rich, and well connected for their son to be kicked out, even though he did, admittedly, lie. It was very poorly written (by a PHD, as they informed us many times in the letter). The parents also decided to forward it to the entire student body in the hopes that it would incite sympathy from the students. It did not. (For the record: it is a terrible thing anytime a kid is kicked out of any school and Woodberry admittedly has harsher regulations than most, but when you invoke the "we're rich and know people" defense AND you make the letter public, you're pretty much asking for derision.)
I would post the best-of the letter but it would be impossible to do so without including identifying features, which would be unfair to the kid who got kicked out so many years ago. This is the "teacher's note" at the end, though:
We were not terribly nice, but what great bonding we had that night poring over this essay for mistakes (just as we never had for our own).
Love it. All of it.
ReplyDeleteBut especially that you are a god among men. That kid knows where it's at.