Children and Art: Sunday in Retirement with George

With music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and book by director James Lapine, Sunday in the Park with George spoke to me instantly on first hearing the original cast album in 1984. At age 25, teaching Drama and English (with some history) to students in middle and upper school, I was ambitious like the central character Georges Seurat to create art that would outlive me. Now, following the week when I retired from the classroom after 40 years, the show speaks to me in a different way.

After I turned in my keys and drove home, I listened to the most recent cast recording. What I picked up more than before was another theme of the show: Children and art are the two things worth leaving behind when you’re gone.

My colleagues in the Fine Arts department helped me this week to see that I leave behind not only scripts and songs that I helped students to write and/or perform, but also the students themselves.

The teachers Katie, Samantha, Regena, Wendy, Todd, Erik, Bill, and Susan surprised me Thursday with gifts, among which was a painting commissioned from a student to be an homage to Sunday’s original Broadway poster. The words allude to “Finishing the Hat,” Sondheim’s song for Seurat that explains his joy “entering the world of the hat” that he draws, and how the woman he loves may not be there waiting when he comes back “to this [world] from that.” Still, he ends triumphantly, “Look! I made a hat / Where there never was a hat.” (Sondheim called his two volumes of collected lyrics Finishing the Hat and Look! I Made a Hat.)

As I unwrapped the painting, fellow drama teacher Katie Arjona explained that the icons for drama, music, and writing imposed on the base of the top hat represent the way my teaching over the years has created love for the arts where there had been none before. I know it’s true, thanks to music teacher Samantha Walker's video of tributes from students in middle school and up, and to some sweet personal statements I heard last week.

At sunset on this first Sunday in my retirement, coincidentally the day of my niece’s wedding, I’m thinking with satisfaction of 2000+ children past and creative arts to come.

[Three more photos: Drama masks in stained glass, commissioned by my colleagues, another perfect gift for an Episcopalian Drama Teacher! [Created by Mr. Brinkley's Studio]

Regena and another retired teacher friend Heather Whitehead put together this cocktail care package with a martini glass for the Arts and Jazz program of Atlanta's High Museum. Finally, there's a selfie with my favorite COVID mask, gift of Susan Rouse.]

For a more general view of Sunday, see my blogpost Sunday, Art, and Forever (11/2015) about why so many of us, Sondheim included, cry at the act one finale of this show.