a poor player

Dunkirk NY – This week is the in-between week for me. The university closes almost all its academic buildings during the period in between the submission of final grades (or the day before Christmas Eve) and January 2. This is in an attempt to save energy and thus save money. So I’m sort of doing odds-and-ends sort of  activities, such as writing letters of recommendation for students applying to graduate schools and and summer theatre, answering other assorted queries, cleaning up my work space at home, etc. Here are just some random thoughts floating around the brain with no particular context:

• Theatre Blog of the Year – If there were such a thing, my vote would go to Lucas Krech at Light Que 23. His blog is a model of what I think a blog ideally should be (and what I wish mine was but often is not). When he is working on a lighting design, he lets you into his creative process. He is not a polemicist. He writes pretty much from his own point of view and sticks with how he is reacting to his own work and creative situation. Here’s a sample post which illustrates why I like his style.
• Another favorite blog of mine is Scooter in the Sticks. The author is a photographer and rides a Vespa LX 250 (could be a 150 based on his URL but I think he wouldn’t ride where he does on anything less than a 250). He lives out somewhere near State College PA and combines his love of riding and photography with meditations about life and simple living. His photographs are pretty cool. I have always envied the life of artists who can create art all by themselves, without the need for collaboration. Can an actor truly act without at least an audience? Unless there is a live audience present, I have no art to create. So jealous.
• I love snowblowing, and the last two days have given me ample opportunity to pull out the snowthrower and go to town. It has the same feeling on completion as does lawnmowing. Once completed, there is a certain symmetry to the paths neatly cut into the layer of snow covering the rest of the ground. I am not very mechanically inclined, and apparently over the summer my snowthrower got some water into the muffler and carburetor, so I had to pony up $90 to get it going again ($70 for labor and $10 for taxes). But there is something so satisfying about watching that plume of snow fly out from the chute and fall 15 feet away. And it is so much easier on my back. The purchase of this machine was, of course, necessitated by advancing age and the lack of children living in the house. There are so many times, such as when I clear the driveway or do my wash, that I am grateful for certain types of mechanical inventions, even if I do lack the mechanical skills to engage in their maintenance and repair.
• I found out last week that I have a fractured  sesamoid bone in my right foot. That’s the bone that essentially connects the big toe with the rest of the foot. It’s the result of the scooter accident I had last November. I had not thought I had done any serious damage to the foot, but as the foot was slow to heal and become pain-free, I went and had it checked out. So now my right foot has a small boot on it which I wear as often as possible, and always in the house. I am planning on participating in the broadsword class one of my colleagues is offering in the spring semester so that I can get certified as an actor combatant in broadsword, and I need the foot to be able to take the stress of that kind of movement. So a little resting up is in order.
• I’ve never quite understood the fascination with New Year’s Day. It always seemed so arbitrary to me.
• Two projects are sitting in limbo, and I don’t know what to do to bring them up to speed. It’s been a year now since I created the Acting In America website, and while I realize I have not done one iota of publicizing the site, it still surprises me that, the internet being what it is, no one in over a year has submitted any stories or even made an inquiry. Not one. I’ve no idea what this means other than the idea is bad, or my marketing is bad (probably both). You’d think there would have been at least one person somewhere out there in cyberspace willing to share their journey as an actor in this country. I also have been toying with starting a web site focusing on reviews and feature stories of the Buffalo theatre scene, but when I consider the amount of work involves, I tend to take a step back. Perhaps, with no show to direct this semester, this is the ideal time to begin it.
• A musical featuring The Addams Family? Really? And I guess Jerry Zaks must now be considered the replacement for the late George Abbott.

That should do it for now. And Happy New Year, if you go in for that sort of thing.  -twl

Dunkirk NY – You must read this. You must. The author of this blog, Barry Hessenius, has written a remarkably objective, trenchant and perhaps even prophetic blog post, concerning how the last five years’ worth of predictions about the state of the arts in this country have turned out, and what the future may possibly hold. He writes at a national level, as a proponent for local arts organizations and art educators nationwide. A few key paragraphs to whet your appetite:

“Last year’s election and the Obama Campaign model generated considerable excitement and optimism in the sector that real “change” was in the air, and certainly systemic, dynamic change seemed, if not inevitable, then, at least, possible. Early hope that we might somehow replicate the online success of aggregating huge numbers of small and individual supporters has fallen by the wayside as somehow we seemed content to wait for it to just happen of its own accord. It did not. If there was a window of opportunity to tap into that feeling across America, it was a very small window and we neither had the know-how to even begin to capitalize on it, nor were we in any position to do so in terms of people or infrastructure. While we celebrated the inclusion of the arts in the stimulus package and believed that under Obama our fortunes would now change, campaign enthusiasm is axiomatically very difficult to sustain in the electorate post an election, and much of that energy has dissipated under the weight of the continuing economic plight, the seemingly never-ending American foreign involvements and the threat of those that want to harm us, and, perhaps most of all, the now more pronounced than ever partisan divide that increasingly makes cooperation and working together virtually impossible. Again, the reality of our sector was survival mode and nobody was charged or empowered with the formal pursuit of any of these larger enterprises. The Administration, it seemed, has larger and more pressing matters on its plate.”

“While we have recognized for some time that there is a divide and disconnect between making and consuming art in the new technologically empowered private (or amateur) sector as compared to our nonprofit arts organization ecosystem, we have yet to get any kind of handle around how we can deal with that challenge and it continues to loom ominously out there like some dark star. At the same time, we now have verifiable studies that confirm that our audiences continue to shrink, yet our reseach hasn’t provided us with real clues how to stem that downward spiral in the short term. And while we know our traditional funding and revenue streams – from philanthropic and public sources, earned income, audiences, and from individual donors — are all undergoing sea changes, we still don’t yet know where all this is going or where we will end up, and we have only band-aid solutions so far. If the bleeding gets really worse, many of us may be in big trouble.”

“Despite official designations to the contrary, nowhere is art thought to be a core subject. We have to make it a core subject – legally as well as within people’s consciousness – and in that order if we wish to succeed. This is a losing game without substantial political clout – which we do not have. Arts education that is not mandated will forever be subject to outside parental and community support to survive. At the core of the belief that the arts are just a frill is that arts education is not on a par in importance with math and science. This is more than an issue of educating the public. It’s highly political.”

Plenty more where that came from. H/T Ian David Moss.  -twl

Dunkirk NY – I came to the realization after writing last evening’s post that I had read the 2008 NEA Survey of Public Participation in the Arts all wrong. At first I thought it was a report that demonstrated that theatre was failing the American public. The one item I forgot to factor into my equation in looking at the report was that, by and large, most people working professionally in today’s urban-oriented and urban-centric theatre don’t really care about the American public at large. Why is that? Because they’ve come to realize that the American public doesn’t care about the theatre or theatre artists. So, naturally, theatre artists made the only choice they could under these circumstances – they now only care about themselves, their careers, and people like themselves. Since the NEA study clearly demonstrates that only well-off, upper-middle-class, white, older people (like myself) are coming to the theatre, this should be taken as a great sign that the theatre is reaching precisely the demographic it wants to reach, and that the effort has paid off.

The mistake too many people are making in reading the NEA report is assuming that people outside of the five largest urban areas actually care about theatre or would like to have theatre in their cities or communities. Well, they don’t. And we, as theatre artists, have rightfully decided that, since the data demonstrates their lack of interest in the theatre, we should no longer bother creating any theatre for them. If they don’t care to come to see the theatre we create about ourselves (in other words, if they don’t care about us), why should we create anything for them or care about them? Simply by taking the section of the American public that doesn’t go to the theatre out of the equation, since we are not serving them anyway, the data then clearly shows our level of success. All we really have to do is solve the thorny issue of continuing to finance our own success, hopefully by getting a larger slice of the American public’s tax money. All of us do, after all, pay taxes – we deserve it!

Where is the evidence for this? Well, you could start right here if you’ve a mind to and read the entire comment thread concerning the quality or lack thereof of Sarah Ruhl’s plays. The commenters all fit the NEA demographic, and they are having a great time and a lot of fun discussing the quality of Ms. Ruhl’s work. Now, regardless of how you feel about the quality of Ms. Ruhl’s plays, the question you have to ask yourself in light of the NEA study is: what audience is Ms. Ruhl writing for? It appears to me that, given her plays get produced a lot by theatres that cater to the NEA’s demographic, she is writing for the audience that goes to those theatres, and that audience is composed precisely of the people in the NEA study who most frequently go to the theatre; i.e. the commenters. Her success in the professional theatre depends, in fact, on writing for that demographic. The NEA study, rather than showing us what failures we are, has given us all the best information we could have: to be successful in today’s theatre, write plays that appeal to the play-going demographic! What could be a more simple formula for success?

Want more evidence? Once again, Isaac Butler and friends provides us with all the evidence you’ll need. Analyze these lists a little, and you’ll see that by and large, with some exceptions thrown in (and what study doesn’t always have a few exceptions?), they fit right into the NEA’s profiled demographic – with the very clear exception that there are not enough female playwrights on the list. The demographic should tell us we need many more female playwrights for the larger percentage of female theatregoers (a good thing people are getting on that issue!). There you have it – success in the theatre today comes from writing for its demographic.

Thank goodness that our educational institutions have seen the report for what it truly is, and continue to educate their students to feed this demographic. If you’re in a BFA or MFA program of any stripe – acting, musical theatre, playwriting, or design – you’re getting just the training and education you need to fit right into this demographic. You’re most interested in what’s happening in and around New York City or Chicago or Los Angeles; you’re getting the message that “going pro” is the one true career option you have; you’re getting all the headshot/résumé/audition training you’ll need. In fact, you’re probably already a junior member of this demographic yourself: white, female, getting a college education, with parents who are fairly well-off financially. It helps if you’re in an educational institution that not only trains you solely for this demographic but also has connections into the profession in some manner; but if not, rest assured you’re still getting an education that will make you feel right at home with today’s theatrical demographic. Sorry about the debt you’ll have until you’re 55 or so.

And don’t forget, since the theatre is as subject to the principles of social entropy as a liberal arts education or civil rights are, it’s only natural that today’s theatre reflects a different reality than the spirit and vision reflected by the work of the Group Theatre, the Federal Theatre Project, or the work of such boring playwrights (by today’s standards) as O’Neill, Odets, Miller, Hellman, Wilson or Williams. Thank goodness that today we seldom see plays written with the types of characters they wrote. Those kinds of plays and characters might appeal to a general American public, and that would skew the demographics something awful.

Hopefully by pointing all this out I have given the theatre world a holiday gift it can truly appreciate – the assuaging of their guilt. Once you fully understand the reality that people who don’t go to the theatre really, truly don’t want to go to the theatre, you can then stop feeling guilty about declining attendance, lack of diversity, class inequities and the like. After all, don’t you really want to produce theatre for those who want to be there, and can afford to be there? Isn’t that what counts? Isn’t that where the road to your professional success truly lies? You don’t really want the American public in your theatres, do you? Why, that might mean getting theatre out into America, and having more artists live out in America, and meet everyday Americans of all sorts of backgrounds and income levels and ethnic backgrounds and political persuasions – and what an inconvenience that would be! I mean, you just can’t get a good bagel and a smear out there!  -twl

Dunkirk NY – Do I want to jump into the diversity fray? I do not. Why not? Because the debate itself is another manifestation of the worsening entropic nature of theatre itself at this point in time. According to social entropy theory, much of any organization’s energy and time is spent preventing an organization from descending into a state of chaos. As an organism or organization corrodes or decays, more and more time and energy is needed to maintain the status quo, and less and less energy is actually spent producing anything of use or value. Ultimately, the decaying state of the organization is simply too far gone for any corrective action to be worthwhile or effective, and the organization goes into a state of chaos, or death.

I am going to quote a large section of a very interesting post on the social entropy of ideas written by Robert L. Payton, Professor Emeritus of Philanthropic Studies at Indiana University and Senior Research Fellow of the Center on Philanthropy. All you need do is think of the rise of regional theatre from the early 1950s until now to see the parallel.

The key notion is what I think of as the social entropy of ideas. Untutored as I am in physics, I still rashly use my sense of the word entropy to identify a common social problem: the way new ideas and visions lose their excitement and energy over time.  Let me use a favorite example:

Daniel Bell’s history of the idea of general education tells of a phenomenon that I not only observed but participated in. For a few decades there was a general education movement that changed the face of undergraduate education nationwide. The educated person should also be able to think effectively about contemporary civilization.  Some highly respected intellectuals at places like Columbia and Chicago led the way; the bible of the movement was Harvard’s General Education in a Free Society, published in 1945.  Sections of the chapter on the theory of general education in that book reveal its ambitions: Areas of Knowledge, Traits of Mind, and the Good Man [sic] and the Citizen.

The core principle was that education should be comprehensive and balanced: the educated person should know something about science, something about literature, something about math, something about history. Over time those became “distribution requirements,” and a student’s course load would typically show math, English, history, physics, and biology, with some other subjects deemed essential, over the first two years of study, after which the assumption was that the student would specialize or major in something.  As the requirements became increasingly rigid they also reflected a change in the culture.  Those who taught general education courses were soon a successor generation to those who had dreamed up the idea in the first place. The successor generation had not for the most part engaged directly in the exhilarating discussions and debates of the first generation. The focus had shifted from philosophy to practice, from innovation to administration.

By the 1960s the lack of intellectual engagement in the core ideas made the philosophy of general education vulnerable to criticism from students, especially those bright students who resented the one-size-fits-all approach.  “Citizenship” was out of favor with the young and they were ripe for protest on the spectrum of issues that mark the era – civil rights, Vietnam, feminism.  Discussions of the curriculum were political protest meetings.  As a college president in those days I presided over some unforgettable moments: for example, when the chair of modern languages appealed to his colleagues not to drop the language requirement because “We will lose our jobs!” and when the stereotypical radical student (dressed in the Army fatigues that were the fashion of the time) made a speech of Ciceronian eloquence to protest the speech requirement that prevented him from taking a philosophy course.

In the process we may have lost the vision of civil rights as we seem to have lost the vision of general education.

I thought back to The Purposes of Higher Education that Huston Smith wrote in behalf of a distinguished faculty committee at Washington University in the 1950s.  The earlier sense of general and liberal education was dead –a cluster of ideas as unappealing as a bouquet of wilted flowers.

We haven’t ever recovered from that collapse, and instead have turned undergraduate education into vocational training. The liberal arts are largely service courses for students who want to learn how to do marketing in order to get a job. The capture of the intellectual life of the campus by marketplace values is complete.  As a voice for the liberal arts I feel like a quixotic subversive – subversive because I criticize the dominant culture as shallow and exploitative, and quixotic because not many people care about it. The social entropy or perhaps the half-life of the idea of general education was less than a generation.

Let me offer a second example: civil rights.  My simplistic summary will at least be briefer.

The high points of the civil rights movement would include a number of memorable moments, from Rosa Parks on the bus to the small group at the lunch counter, from “the letter from a Birmingham jail” to Federal troops in Little Rock.  For those of us who lived through it, watched it, and in various less dramatic and inspiring ways took part in it, the civil rights movement has to be a period of enormous social energy and excitement.  This was no academic exercise; this affected where academics went to dinner, which students sat in their classes, what words they would use in polite conversation. The claims of civil rights activists also affected the banks and the military and the churches and the veterans social clubs and residential real estate values.

Fast-forward if you will to the recent attack on affirmative active in higher education.  The contrast in the spirit of the 1990s and the spirit of the 1960s could not be greater. The successor generation gradually assumed its place.  In those decades the spirit of the civil rights movement gave way to the implementation of civil rights legislation and administration.  The spirit of civil rights and the task of making the ideas of racial equality work on a day-to-day basis seemed no longer connected.  Advocates of civil rights were now ideologues, and ideologues rose to oppose them.  Political correctness – better described as groupthink – prevailed on both sides.

In the process we may have lost the vision of civil rights as we seem to have lost the vision of general education.

And so it is in this discussion of diversity in the theatre, as well as discussions of theatre at large; we may have already lost the vision of theatre itself.  Pick any issue you want to discuss pertaining to today’s theatre, and the first think you will note is that it almost immediately becomes a discussion about how to fix, repair, or otherwise rehabilitate a crumbing institution and infrastructure. There comes a time in the life of every person, every organism, every institution, where you have to make the call as to whether what you have is a fixer-upper, a handyman’s special, or a structure no longer worth salvaging. That’s what entropy does, and it is as natural a process as breathing.

What continues to baffle me these days is the fact that so many of the playwright bloggers out there still actually want into this decaying shack. They want a piece of this action. They seem to see a future in it somehow. One of the most noticeable absences of the younger generation as I perceive it is the apparent lack of any counter-cultural movement proclaiming the corruption of the current system and any related action aimed at its destruction. I have been trying to figure that one out now for 15 years. Still no answer. They just continue to knock at the same old rickety doors, asking to be let in by any means (degree, ethnic background, gender, race – even talent!) possible.

It is during times and discussions like these that I am glad I never did try to make a living strictly in the professional theatre. Sometimes, it’s just far, far better to live far from the madding crowd.  -twl

PS – Happy holidays!

Dunkirk NY – One more day to dig out from underneath all my grading. Finals week was quite busy this year, but by the end of today, the darkest day of the year, I will have handed in all my grades and can then begin to crawl back out and find the light at the end of the tunnel. So for now, my annual solstice post:

Goethe’s final words: “More light.” Ever since we crawled out of that primordial slime, that’s been our unifying cry, “More light.” Sunlight. Torchlight. Candlelight. Neon, incandescent lights that banish the darkness from our caves to illuminate our roads, the insides of our refrigerators. Big floods for the night games at Soldier’s Field. Little tiny flashlights for those books we read under the covers when we’re supposed to be asleep. Light is more than watts and footcandles. Light is metaphor. Thy word is a lamp unto my feet. Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Lead, kindly light, amid the encircling gloom, lead thou me on; the night is dark and I am far from home; lead thou me on. Arise, shine, for thy light has come. Light is knowledge, light is life, light is light.

Chris in the Morning, from the television show Northern Exposure.

And this year, an added bonus – Marilyn and her friends perform the story of The Raven. Note the demographics of the audience. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if theatre like this existed across the United States in communities from coast to coast?

Dunkirk NY – For those of you interested in weather phenomena, yes, I do live right in the heart of the upstate NY snow belt that got walloped over Thursday and Friday. How bad was it? Bad enough for Paul Goodloe of the Weather Channel to be reporting from right down in the harbor. There were some impressive totals in the area, but right here on the Lake Erie shoreline there was only about 8 inches or so. The 40-60MPH winds did push it around a lot, though. My snowblower did not start. I have little luck with machinery.

Of course, Mother Nature can’t whip up a storm anything the likes of what the theatrical blogosphere can when it wants to. Isaac Butler tweeted a statistic about the educational background of playwrights, and there was a lot of commentary from all quarters about that stat (you can read the comments on his blog and follow an assorted variety of links from there). The statistic came on the heels of the forum on diversity held by Arena Stage last week, as well as an NEA Cultural Workforce Forum. All these issues seem to have stirred much heat.

And there was a livecast on Dec. 10th from the NEA concerning its recent release of its latest survey, the 2008 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts. Ian Moss at Createquity has the remnants of the tweetcast on his blog. This survey has been around for some time, since 1982 I believe, but few people ever paid attention to them. Until now. I’ve read all of them and actually wrote about some of them in earlier posts. I am sure this latest one will get more attention than any of the other surveys ever received.

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Dunkirk NY – Over the weekend bloggers Scott Walters, Isaac Butler and Adam Thurman attended a conference entitled Defining Diversity held at Arena Stage. None of them have given any full write-up yet, although Isaac has posted some quotes from the conference. Since I did not attend,  I’ve nothing really to say about the conference itself. But I do have this observation on the subject of diversity: until we create a theatre curriculum that offers to theatre students other options for engaging in and creating theatre that are not centered around the pre-professional pseudo-Broadway model, diversity in the theatre will be a dream never to come true. Sooner or later, someone (Rocco maybe?) will have to realize that theatre educators at all levels are the front line of this art form’s future, and sooner or later some concern and perhaps even some respect must be paid to the work we currently do, and the work we need to do. I would love to see the “guest list” for this conference, because I’m willing to bet that no educators were invited to the conference (Scott, I am thinking, was invited because he blogs, not primarily because he teaches. It’s a good thing he was there; he’ll give us the educator’s slant). If my hunch is correct, it’s further evidence that the theatre world in general thinks it can do what it needs to do without the help of its educators.

This was the best (unattributed) quote I found from Isaac’s post:

We have to take the idea of diversity and turn it into the idea of democracy. Democracy in the arts.  The humane social action and process and practice that elevates and promotes the best in individuals. The book has been written on multiculturalism and diversity. We need to change the frame. (ed:bold mine)

Isaac also writes about changing the landscape. I have written before about the disconnect between working theatre artists, theatre institutions and organizations, and theatre education in this country. If you want true democracy in the theatre, if you really want to change the landscape, then it has to start as students begin their education in the theatre. It has to start with the theatre curriculum. It has to start with being able to offer viable and supported options to “making it” in the profession that go beyond the NYC-centric attitude so prevalent in young people (and in theatre in general). We need to start cutting off the students from the theatrical kool-aid, stop Wal-Marting the educational process of training our students, and give them the most important element of diversity possible: the element of viable options. Until they can truly see that there are other viable and exciting options beyond Broadway, you will never have true diversity – or democracy – in American theatre.

Every significant change in American society has happened because people became better educated about a subject or an issue. Why theatre institutions do not take theatre education seriously, and theatre educators are unwilling to reform their curricula, continues to puzzle me. American theatre will neither be a strong cultural institution nor a diverse or democratic one until we get truly serious about supporting theatre and arts education at all levels. -twl

Dunkirk NY -Although I haven’t written since the last day of November, it wasn’t because I needed a week off. It was because I went right into a very, very hectic week of juries and one-act rehearsals. From Monday through Friday of last week I think on average I did not come home from work before 11:00 PM. In the process I saw 62 juries, gave feedback to those 62 performance majors, and saw 14 rehearsals, giving feedback for those. Each rehearsal session lasts about one hour. Oh, and yesterday evening I saw two senior recitals. That was my week.

Acting juries are quite the process. What we do is have each BFA Musical Theatre or Acting major perform two short (45 seconds) monologues in front of all five performance faculty, so it’s formed like a mock audition. The faculty have evaluation sheets, and fill them out during the jury. It takes us two three-hour sessions to get through all the students. Then the following three days we have three four-hour sessions where the performance faculty deliver their feedback to each student individually. That’s about 10 minutes apiece. It’s an intense experience for the students and an exhausting one for us. By the end of juries week you’re pretty much talked out.

Is it a good process? Truthfully, I am not sure. Part of this process has been driven by external forces. The national movement towards more assessment in higher education has meant that we have taken this process, which has been in place for some time, and made an attempt to quantify it. So where as before the evaluation sheets were all in the realm of comments, now they are on a scale of 1-5, so a student can get a maximum total of 30 points overall, and have her score averaged across the five faculty auditors. We also have our categories (overall performance, acting technique, voice and movement) tied to our program’s stated learning objectives. As far as a process is concerned, I think it’s tolerable.

Perhaps of all the things I am discovering through this process is how often all five of us are in agreement about any given student’s ability and performance on that day. I think perhaps that’s the best sign of all, because it means that we are all on the same page when it comes to an individual student’s growth and development, and there is not sense of favoritism; each student hears more or less the same thing from all five of us. If the message to the student is consistent, then the student has little opportunity for playing one faculty member off on another, and can be relatively sure that what is being said has value and truth to it.

The human factor is of course another thing. For the students, the pressure factor comes into play. At the freshman and sophomore level, they understand that these first four juries mean they either get to continue in the program or get cut. Their fourth jury is called their barrier, and to continue in the program they must pass that barrier. We are usually pretty frank about letting a student know where they stand before they get to that point. If we think it’s necessary we issue warning letters beginning the end of the freshman year. We do all we can to make sure that, if we release a student from the BFA program, it comes as no real surprise. We also take into account things like work habits, attendance in class, work in productions; all the usual. I think in some circles it’s called “disposition.” Once they pass their barrier they cannot be bounced from the program unless the circumstances are extraordinary. So the juries from that point on tend to be meetings with the faculty to discuss growth, where they should progress next, and preparation for their final recital. They are not quite as stressful for the student.

The juries can also be emotional moments for students. For students whose work is not so good, they sometimes break out in tears as they hear the comments. Interestingly enough, we occasionally tell a talented student that, despite their talent, they are still exhibiting some bad habits they need to break, and that causes some emotion as well. They realize we are not giving them credit for what gave them success in high school, and sometimes that comes as a shock. But the reverse is true as well – when we see tremendous growth in a student, even when that student is one we know may not ever be a professional, we go to great lengths to let them know how much we appreciate and respect their growth and development, and that makes some kids feel pretty good. And again, the tears. You can see the relief in their faces; sometimes I can almost see the stress just melt away. Those are good moments.

So it’s one more week of classes, including the one-act festival this Tues-Thur., and then a week of finals and semester break. I have a great deal of re-organizing to do this winter break, which I hope will bear some fruit next semester. We shall see.  -twl