Paul's Turn: Pianist Paul Ford Remembers Broadway

Pianist Paul Ford played for countless Broadway musicals and concerts between the 1970s and his retirement a few years ago. He played mostly for auditions and rehearsals, but he also played for the original runs of Stephen Sondheim shows Sunday in the Park with George, Into the Woods, Assassins, and Passion. Before leaving for New York, Paul Ford mentored me during a summer theatre program in Atlanta's Northside School of Performing Arts.

He has published his memoir Lord Knows, at Least I was There: Working with Stephen Sondheim. Foreword by Mandy Patinkin. New York: Moreclacke Publishing, 2022. [Photo Collage: Paul with his book and the Sondheim scores I own thanks to Paul's influence.]

Ford's memoir gives us the backstory to his time at Northside, including a lip-synched production of Oklahoma in his family's garage, his realization that he was gay, and his introduction to alcohol. He admits that he played through most of his career with a hangover, but he's been sober now for many years, thanks in part to a miraculous coincidence involving a haunted house, a film made there, and that film's leading actress. It makes a good story.

There are so many good stories in this memoir that I read it through in a day. He has fond and funny memories of stars whose first names are enough for any Sondheim fan: Ethel, Julie, Mandy, Bernadette, Patti, Donna, Marin, Lonny, Jim, Lauren, and even Madonna. For memories funny but cringey from work with other composers there are Chita and Liza in Kander and Ebb's dismal musical The Rink, and his bête noire Teresa Stratas, opera diva, who assaulted him during a rehearsal for Rags by Charles Strouse and Stephen Schwartz.

My favorite story may be the one about Elaine taking Ford to see a show for which she had no tickets: "I am Elaine Stritch," she thundered at the box office, she wanted seats front row center, and she didn't expect to pay. When he asked if she'd ever been refused, she said, "F***ing Mamma Mia."

Many of the stories are about hi-jinx backstage and during rehearsals, when theatre was fun, Ford says, before everyone retreated to dark corners with their phones to "text, text, text." He tells how he played snippets of songs from the early careers of performers when they entered the rehearsal hall. For Sondheim, he played the disturbing opening bars of Psycho by the composer's favorite film composer Bernard Herrmann.

(When Paul saw me from the pit of Into the Woods in 1987, he warmed up the band with "Georgy Girl," the only sheet music I'd been able to find to fit my narrow range in 9th grade. Throughout that summer program, he embarrassed me with that tacky song whenever he could. I was delighted that he remembered.)

Writers and directors are more of a mixed bag. As often as Ford mentions Sondheim, he thanks him for being a real composer who actually wrote down the notes for his songs and knew what he was doing. Not so, many other so-called composers who left it to Ford and the music director Paul Gemignani to make real songs out of little tunes they hummed into tape recorders. No thanks to many directors who had no musical theatre experience, no musical knowledge, and no clue, who mounted revivals ("revisals," Paul calls them) of musicals with their "improvements."

When the story takes him to the marquee for Cats, Ford pauses for a moment of silence to remember the Broadway musical, killed by Andrew "Void" Webber and his ilk, abetted by the producers who have kept the shows running for generations of tourists. The further into the book we go, the more pointed Paul gets on this subject. So far as I've seen in published reports, Sondheim was diplomatic about Webber, but in one story Sondheim and Ford are waiting in a studio where Phantom star Michael Crawford was recording a song that Paul calls "Muzak of the Night." As Crawford asked to try it again slower, slower, and slower still, Sondheim retreated further behind his newspaper, which trembled -- from laughter.

Sondheim fans know what we're in for when Ford asks rhetorically, "Why did I do it? What did it get me?" In Ford's favorite show Gypsy, those are the questions of the main character Rose in a bitter survey of her disappointments in life, when she declares "now it's gonna be my turn." Like that number, Ford's rant pulls in themes from all the preceding material to indict the current lack of sophistication or joy on Broadway.

But the sun comes out when Paul Ford writes about what he loves:

That is why I like overtures and show music so much. The variety! Film music with its combination of source music and dramatic scoring is equally satisfying. Dance music in films and Broadway shows used to be done with great, if not inspired, imagination. Give some expert arranger a little song and let him go to town on it. I love big band and swing music because of the inventiveness and pure joy and humor in the arrangements. I even love jazz because of its harmonic intricacies (220).

Those are loves he passed on to me. I'm about six years younger, so I was very excited at age 15 to have this sophisticated musical genius pay attention to me during breaks in rehearsals. Knowing that I loved comic books, he gave me a cassette recording to the wonderful 1960s musical It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's Superman (songs I still know by heart) and xeroxed copies of Bernstein's Overture to Candide which I still have, which I used to be able to play, and the Weill-Gershwin song "The Saga of Jenny" from his then-favorite musical Lady in the Dark. His parting gift to me was to insist that I look into the works of Stephen Sondheim. [For the rest of that story, all five decades of it, see my Sondheim page.]

If Paul gets to read this review, I hope he'll be gratified to know that I emulated him by playing piano for rehearsals and performances for school productions of Into the Woods, Sweeney Todd, Little Shop of Horrors, Damn Yankees, Joseph... and Big, and that I introduced generations of students to Sondheim. Some of them are now directors and teachers, doing the same.

Also, he and I are evidently the only two people alive who treasure the totally-overlooked song "Poems" from Sondheim's much-overlooked Pacific Overtures.

[See earlier tributes to Paul that are integrated with blogposts about Sondheim as teacher and Sondheim's Tribute to Leonard Bernstein.]

Shakespeare on School Stages

Shakespeare's work is a creative playground for directors and actors.

I wrote that about Joel Coen's The Tragedy of Macbeth (see Macbeth for the Fun of It 01/2022), but it's true at school, too: I write from experience teaching drama in high school and middle school for 40 years.

Shakespeare offers a few advantages to school drama teachers. You have no royalty payments, you can access free scripts online, and you get lots of flexibility to cast roles for everyone in your club or class. With freedom to edit and with centuries' precedents for updates and reinterpretations, you can play to the interests and strengths of your students, whether they're 11 or 17.

Updating the Material
While I cut Shakespeare's scenes short, I never changed any words except the most obscure ones. But my actors and I enjoyed figuring out ways to transplant the stories to other times and locales.

• Setting Macbeth in the near-future, our 8th grade club made the title character a cyborg. Why? First, because it's cool! Then, making him more metallic as the play progressed was a visual analog for the character's decreasing humanity. We found modern-day analogs for other characters, too. Lady Macbeth was playing tennis at the country club when we first saw her. For her, being queen was all about being a celebrity: that was the young actor's idea. We used the school's big-screen TV to make the witches into TV pundits, and we simulated security camera footage to show the trees of Birnam Forest marching up the hill towards the castle.
• When we did Taming of the Shrew in the late-80s, Kate dressed like Cyndi Lauper, while her younger sister was the preppie cheerleader. Their music teacher was a country-western guitarist; the Latin teacher was modeled on our school's Latin teacher. Petruchio and his crew resided on a yacht. He arrived at the wedding, late, dressed (underdressed) like Rambo. I should've known better than to trust the 8th grade boys who asked if Jimmy Buffett would be okay for the music at the party scene in the final act. As Petruchio and Kate happily exited to their long-delayed honeymoon, we heard "Why Don't We Get Drunk and Screw?" Well, it certainly did fit the situation.
  
• We did two of Shakespeare's most popular comedies as 1920s musicals. That gave a dozen 6th grade girls roles as tap-dancing chorines, and gave student musicians a place on stage in costume to be the jazz combo. I wrote 20s-style music for songs in Midsummer Night's Dream, and made Twelfth Night a jukebox musical of early Gershwin songs. Since I made Duke Orsino a Broadway producer, we called the show First Night. Members of "his" theatre company sang songs that expressed the feelings of the dramatic leads. For instance, when young Viola is feeling helpless and alone, her double the Ingenue sang "Someone to Watch Over Me."
• Sixth graders did Julius Caesar ca. 1989 in the school library, where we used the library's heavy TV on rollers to show videotape of General Caesar arriving by jet while TV reporter "Flavia Octavia" interviewed his fans at the airport. Then Caesar and his entourage entered in fatigues and sunglasses: the actors loved it. Updating Shakespeare multiplies opportunities for girls to play big roles as soldiers, senators, doctors, reporters, etc.

Even when my students and I didn't update Shakespeare, we did make our interpretations reflective of the young actors' own feelings.

• When I asked Thomas, a high school senior who had proven himself in many supporting roles, which part he wanted in Twelfth Night, I figured he'd go for one of the comic roles. Instead, he empathized with "Malvolio" for being conscientious, scrupulously honest, and under-appreciated. His belief in the character's basic goodness showed. We had great performances in the other roles, but the injustice done to Malvolio brought pain into the comedy.

• Some of those same actors presented Hamlet in rep with Rozencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. Bill, a senior who had played many roles on our stage, was eager to tackle the Prince. Bill told me that he saw the prince, not as a crazed or vengeful man, but a truth-teller and healer, a young man of faith seeking to redeem a sick and sinful situation. I edited and directed the show accordingly (and got it down to 90 minutes!).
• My very first Shakespeare production as director was The Tempest, performed on the tiny stage that our Episcopal middle school used for chapel services. We shaped the show for Episcopalian sensibilities. For a set, we hung images of nature that were mosaics in the manner of stained glass. Prospero was robed like a priest. The banquet in the middle of the play was staged as communion with a procession of spirits robed as acolytes who set the table as an altar with candles, bread, and goblets. When the guilty characters knelt to eat, Ariel commanded them to go, acknowledge their sins, and repent (cf. Psalm 24-25, "Let the table before them be a trap..."). While buddies John and Thomas clowned around in the comic subplot, student actor Peter brought out the dignity and anger of "Caliban."

[Images are my photo collages of middle-school and upper-school productions I directed at St. Andrew's Episcopal School from photos taken between 1983 and 1998. Actors include some people I've seen on Facebook: Emily Levin née Powell, Bill Hamilton, Leigh Ann Evans, Thomas Crockett, Brian Griffin, Caldwell Collins, Emily Vance. The Tempest pre-dated my practice of making photo collages. ]

[My students from St. Andrew's joined me for many summer seasons at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival. Read more (09/2021)]

"Art + Faith" : Joy and Discovery in Making Church

"Well, duh."

That was my first reaction to artist Mako Fujimura's book Art + Faith: A Theology of Making (Yale University Press, 2021). I've always experienced my faith through the arts. (see how)

My second reaction is, Fujimura's idea to integrate art-making with "doing church" might bring new seekers and new commitment to an Episcopal parish.

His idea might also alienate parishioners who've told me they're just not creative. Fear not! Here's what I know from teaching middle school:

• The difference between an artist and anyone else is not talent or creativity, but only the curiosity to see what emerges if they keep working on a project.
• That's why making art is a way to discover something.
• That's why making art is also (1) as hard for a pro as for a novice and (2) a joy.

Let's see what Fujimura has in mind, and then look at possible applications to St. James of Marietta GA.

[PHOTO: Quilt makers at St. James Church honored our change-ringers. Each color represents a different bell in St. James's tower; the sequence never repeats during this set of changes.]

Practicing Resurrection
Fujimura wants Church to appeal to his friends who, when asked their religion, check "none." These "Nones" find spirituality in art, not in church. At the same time, Fujimura doesn't want to alienate Christian friends who are suspicious of unbridled self-expression.

So Fujimura does not limit his idea of "art" to what's in galleries and concert venues. For him, the salient characteristic of art is that something be made, not for utility -- not just for utility -- but for love (18). He finds numerous examples of "making" in our tradition. In Scripture:

• God creates for love
• Adam names the creatures
• craftsmen make the Ark of the Covenant, their names recorded in Exodus for posterity, their work described with loving detail
• the woman at the last supper anoints the living Jesus for burial
• Jesus favors storytelling and metaphor to express his vision
• Poetry fills the Bible in psalms, prophecy, and Paul's letters
• Apostles are works of art in their transformation, Fujimura says

Our liturgy, its words and music, is art. I would add that the Eucharist, originally a pot luck "love feast," has become today a kind of musical drama that we all participate in. [See my short essay Liturgy as Theatre (03/2013)].

Fujimura also finds the Christian world view reflected by secular works of art. Seeing a movie or novel, he would have us ask, where is God in the world of this work? Sin? Judgement? Redemption?

Fujimura reframes "making art" as "practicing resurrection" (147). By "resurrection," he doesn't mean "resuscitation" but the "new creation" we read about in apocalyptic scripture. He explains that the word translated "new" isn't neo but kainos -- metamorphosis, like caterpillar to butterfly. He likens this to the Japanese art called kintsugi, "new newness," exemplified by a broken tea cup that's not just repaired but reimagined as an amalgamation of fragments with gold (ch. 4). Jesus says the kingdom of God will be as different from the life we know as the full-grown plant is different from the seed.

Fujimura finds that "practicing resurrection" appeals both to his evangelical friends and the Nones.

Art + Faith in an Episcopal Church
I know from parish surveys that music and the church's elegant liturgy are high on the list of what draws worshipers to the Episcopal church in general, and to St. James in particular. Can we build on this baseline of appreciation for arts? Might we draw a larger, more committed congregation through an emphasis on what we make?

Sadly, COVID-19 has given us a real-life experiment with what happens when there's no "making" in the church. While we've passively received prayers and sermons, whether online or sitting in pews six feet apart, attendance has fallen. That's not a knock on the preaching of our clergy, but a demonstration of what Fujimura believes:

[U]nless we are making something, we cannot know the depths of God's being....God cannot be known by sitting in a classroom, or even in a church taking in information about God. I am not against these pragmatic activities, but God moves in our hearts to be experienced and then makes us all artists of the kingdom. (7)

He imagines art not just for display or presentation to an audience, but about spiritual formation for the creators themselves. He writes that faith is like an omelette: you can read the recipe, but to get it, you have to make it (61).

Prior to the pandemic, a lot of us were indeed making things at St. James, Marietta. Every week, not just on Sundays, we would sing hymns and anthems, ring bells (hand- and tower-), sew quilts and knit blankets for the needy, guide children through imaginative responses to Bible stories, and set the chancel with linens and silver, candles and flowers, vessels of bread and wine for eucharist. Our church also practiced outreach through hospitality, offering Sunday breakfast and Wednesday supper, providing food and entertainment through the program we call Reach Out Mental Health, and hosting homeless families.

Two of my favorite pieces of art in our church were made by church members. One is a quilt that hangs in our stairwell that represents two communities of art-makers in our parish, the sewing group and the North American Guild of Change Ringers (NAGCR). Squares of different colors alternate in patterns that correspond to our different tower bells ringing changes, never repeating a pattern to the end of the series. (See photo above)

Another is a processional cross created for use during the penitential season of Lent by Bill, a woodworker in our parish. Elegant and polished, it's beautiful, but the wood at the center of the cross has a crack in it. Bill's choice to use that flawed piece at the heart of the cross suggests the suffering at the heart of the season.

How else could parishioners be involved in "making?" Do we envision art classes and rehearsals, concerts and displays -- at what cost of money and time? Would clergy have to vet every piece of work to be certain it aligns with our tradition? What if the work of amateurs isn't so good? Will parishioners be asked to sit through awkward performances during services or evenings? Will artists be offended if we don't hang their work in our halls?

If the Rector appointed me Director of Arts, I'm not sure that I'd do anything more than draw attention to the quilt and cross, the making we already do, and then proclaim: "Let us intentionally make 'making something' a part of whatever we do -- whether we are engaged in worship, study, socializing, or reaching out to the community."

It wouldn't have to be any scarier than when a fellow teacher challenged me to plan a collaborative "active experience" for our seventh graders at the end of every unit after the chapter test. She knew what Fujimura knows: once they'd learned the facts, our activities would help them to relate their knowledge to their lives.

We already do this kind of artistic thinking in educational activities at our church. Our director of children's education plans collaborative creative experiences with her Bible story curriculum, varying the activities to suit children of different ages.

Adults in EfM (Education for Ministry) practice "theological reflection," a process that might as well be called "thinking like poets" as they explore an event or text with imaginative empathy, memory, Scriptural analogies, and metaphors. Often, they draw all the threads of their discussion together into a "collect," a concise form of prayer that comes close to being poetry. [See Where Prayer Meets Poetry (05/2020)]

Even making a list is creative. I asked my adult EfM class, "What ministry do you imagine for yourself? How could the church be of service to YOU in this?" As they answered, they grew more animated:

• to provide a type of caregiver support group – “caregiver” broadly defined (illness, parenting, eldercare) -- that takes “me” out of the equation, helping the caregiver to REALLY see the person they’re caring for. Church? Bible study can help, but a group with activities that everyone does together is also important. (Art, music, poetry, conversation…)
• to create a program that might be called "The Inspired Retired" for retirees to find new ways to become engaged with (1) their own ordinary routines and (2) others
• to fulfill the 12th step, i.e., to work with others struggling with substance abuse.
• to make a deliberate effort to engage with people as equals -- especially strangers we encounter, in public, even at the drive-through -– a ministry one conversation at a time. Church could be a place that welcomes people in this way.
• to pay attention to students who need advising to get through myriad hoops and obstacles during this particularly difficult time.

"Making something" might be sharing participants' insights on video, or using software or art materials to create an image for what they've learned. The subject matter may not be Scripture, but about the church community, about traditions with food and decorations, about life experiences. For example,

• The most intense half hour I shared at a weekend retreat with EfM mentors was when we were given 30 minutes with old magazines to find images that represent elements of our spiritual lives, to cut and paste them into a circle (making a mandala).
• When I sent adults of in my EfM class to roam the church campus with their phones to bring back images that "spoke" to them strongly of our faith, they returned exhilarated and eager to share. (My images were the ones in this article of the quilt and the cross.)

No activity has to be shared beyond the small group, but, posted on the church's social media, such "makings" would show online scrollers that we are a church where people learn, search, wonder, think, connect "church" to their own lives, the larger community, and to popular culture.

Bottom Line from Self-Appointed Director of Arts

Art takes work more than talent; it's more a joy than a grind; it's a process of discovery that goes beyond the delivery of a message; it doesn't have to be about religion to be religious.

Fujimura writes what our experience at church bears out, that thinking like a "maker" is a way to "the deepest level of knowing" (Fujimura 72), an intensifier of our response Scripture and liturgy. In an interview, Fujimura says,

The arts are a cup that will carry the water of life to the thirsty. It’s not the water itself; it’s the vessel. What we are doing in the church today is we are just picking up water with our bare hands and trying to carry it to the thirsty. We can still do it, but the effect is minimized by not fully utilizing what God has given us. (Faithandleadership.com)

Our rector in his Christmas Day sermon this year had a message compatible with Fujimura's. He emphasized that we all should be living out our thanks for the gift of the incarnation. Teaching and debate are not the only ways to do that, he said.

Art is also a builder of community through collaboration, and a value in itself (17-18).

When we re-boot church after the pandemic, what additional "making" could involve parishioners, and how else can we make everyone aware of what we're doing?

Note to Self: What Worked with 7th Graders Can Work For You

My seventh grade English students started every class period the same way: Drop Everything And Read (D.E.A.R.). Chat subsided, and everyone settled into a book. After ten minutes of quiet, feeding on someone else's work, they had to Drop Reading And Write (D.R.A.W.). The coaching I did as I wandered the classroom all applies now to me, as I have the rest of my life to read and write.

• Set aside time, place, and materials. Make start and end times consistent. Place electronic media out of reach, out of sight, out of earshot.
• Until you've written a lot, don't type. Use a pen with a notepad or composition book to write, doodle, draw, diagram. Never erase; never tear a page out; only add alternatives.
• Keep a bank of topics at the back of your notepad: things, people, and places that cause you wonder -- in the sense both of thinking them wonderful and of wondering something about them. Give each item a different area on the page; cluster items that relate; use arrows to connect the clusters.
• Write down opposites and exceptions: the most interesting part is always what happens after "but."
• Think in sets: not one poem / story / essay / vignette but a set of two or three relating to the same subject. Advice from my composition teacher Dr. James Sclater (11/2015).
• When it's time (8:30), quit, and don't come back to work on that piece again until the next day. After breakfast, walk the dog, ride your bike, and save the rest of the day for revisions, answering emails, reading. (Advice from prodigiously productive composer Philip Glass (04/2015).
• [See Photo] Set bird seed and peanuts out on the deck so that you can focus on your work; Brandy will focus on squirrels beyond the doggy door.
• If all you write is a list, that's still writing.

History Hysteria: Nothing New

Bless Sam Sanders, host of the NPR program It's Been a Minute for bringing on a guest who could give us a long view on the uproar over Critical Race Theory. Sam often gives voice to feelings that many of his listeners share (myself included), and this time it's a sickness in the pit of the stomach as he hears of disruptions to school board meetings, threats to members, and legislators resolving, in effect, to ban the teaching of historical facts that might make students feel bad.

Sam's guest Adam Laats, a professor of educational leadership at New York's Binghamton University, focuses his reasearch on cultural reactions to school reform. He taught history in middle school and high school for ten years.

[Photo: Sam Sanders (left), Adam Laats]

Sam wanted to know, has this happened before? If so, has it ever been this bad? And is it unprecedented that it's erupted so quickly in school districts and state legislatures all across the nation?

Dr. Laats gave examples from 1930s, 50s, and 70s to show that, yes, parents have called for the banning of books for drawing attention to inequities in American history; yes, they've burned books and even bombed school buildings (1974, West Virginia); and, no, there's lots of precedent for national media and Washington politicians whipping up coast-to-coast hysteria over local school affairs. Laats's own article on the current CRT "panic," written with Gillian Frank for Slate, concludes that each of these eruptions has succeeded in the short term by removing the curriculum in question, and in the long-term by discouraging teachers from asking questions that might stir up another hornets' nest.

Adam Laats's own website includes a page called My Two Cents where he curates links to his articles and media appearances. Judging his books by their covers -- risky, I know -- I'd say that Laats is finding ways to bridge gaps between fundamentalists and teachers who encourage critical thinking about science and history.

So my blood pressure is down again. Thanks Dr. Laats and Dr. Sanders.

Of Related Interest

• To open up critical inquiry for 8th grade history students, I designed a year around four questions derived from the Pledge of Allegiance: How true is it to say that America is, or ever was, one nation? under God? indivisible? with liberty and justice for all? We studied primary sources and reached no simple answers. See details at Teach History with the Pledge of Allegiance (07/2017).
• "We've been here before" is the somewhat comforting message of Jon Meacham's The Soul of America, a survey of US history composed in 2017 to answer the popular perception that America had never been so divided. See my reflection 07/2018.
• I've thanked Sam Sanders another time for his friendly inquiry into a fraught subject. See Trans Eye for a Bible Guy

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.

Remembering Frank Boggs: Music Teacher, Spiritual Mentor, Friend

Frank Boggs has died. He taught me in high school 50 years ago, and continued to teach me even in the last 20 years of his life. Inviting me to the Metropolitan Opera's Live in HD broadcasts, he got me deeply into repertoire that I hadn't appreciated before. Each spring, he invited me up to his 22nd-floor suite to see the Tony Awards. And of course I saw his Georgia Festival Chorus every year.

With gratitude, I reprint my tribute to him, first posted in 2015.

Frank Boggs taught me in "chorale" at Westminster Schools from 1973 to 1977, but he has remained my mentor and friend to the present day. 

If my deepest ambition is to write sacred music that communicates mystery and grandeur of God, that's my response to glorious music that I learned to love through Mr. Boggs. Throughout my adult life, I've spent almost every Wednesday night in church choir rehearsals, always seeking the joy of hearing my voice blend with others, creating a piece of music that glorifies God in its expression and craftsmanship -- regardless who else may hear it. Truly, my religious faith comes from music more than from scripture or doctrine.

If I love musical theatre (not just Broadway, but opera), that comes from Mr. Boggs, too. He directed me in OKLAHOMA and LITTLE MARY SUNSHINE, and he stoked my interest in Stephen Sondheim with clipped articles and saved programs, giving me the opportunity to direct a suite of Sondheim songs for our small ensemble (see photo below), and, later, to direct the full Chorale's Broadway revue.  My first song was a lyric that he set to music for me. 

Singing is not all that happened in choir rehearsals. Mr. Boggs exposed us to music, cartoons, reviews of theatrical productions, memories of performers, and discussions of religious meanings behind music. He once asked us, "Why did Vivaldi set the happy words 'peace on earth, goodwill to men' to slow, somber minor key music?" (I'd never thought to ask why any artist does anything -- and now it's what I always do.) 

At fifteen, I liked performances that were loud, fast, flashy, with some growls and maybe some screaming thrown in. Then I saw Frank in concert. I and my fellow members of the Westminster Ensemble had performed some numbers at a church in Tennessee, and we were pretty proud of ourselves. He'd told us that he'd be "singing a few numbers," but we realized later that he had been too kind: we were only his warm up act. I remember that he sat at the piano, sang a song or two. Then, while he played some chords, he described for the audience how his grandfather used to sing a certain hymn while tending his garden. Then he lifted his hands from the keys, turned on the bench towards the audience, and sang softly, unaccompanied, a hymn of anguish:

Oh, Lord, if indeed I am thine,
If Thou art my sun and my song,
Say why do I languish and pine?
And why are my winters so long?
Drive these dark clouds from my sky,
Thy soul-soothing presence, restore --
Or take me unto Thee on high,
Where winter and clouds are no more. 

That night I saw the difference between showiness and authenticity, the same difference between entertainment and art.

Frank also gathered the young people in his care to discuss what he called "Quaker Questions," allowing us to share our memories, concerns, and questions -- bonding us and helping us to grow up. I remember asking him about the intense friendships I was enjoying at the age of sixteen: "Do adults have the same kind of friendship?" He answered honestly that the intensity probably would dissipate with time, but that friendship could deepen. Of course, now we're living that truth.

Two Mentors, 
One Photograph

[See photo]  Famed composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim sits on stage while my teacher Frank Boggs (the other bearded man) looks on. I am the worshipful seventeen-year-old second from the right. The photograph was taken in Broadway's Music Box theatre, June 1977. 

Knowing how I idolized Sondheim, Mr. Boggs had told me to write him to ask for an interview, and Sondheim instantly replied. This taught me a life lesson: If you don't at least try, you'll regret it the rest of your life. 

Twenty years later, Mr. Boggs again met Sondheim during a "meet the audience" talk at London's National Theatre. Sondheim asked, "Are you a teacher?" Mr. Boggs nodded. Sondheim said that he'd always wanted to teach, and he said how grateful he was to his teachers. Speaking of the importance of his teachers to him during a national broadcast on his 70th birthday, Sondheim actually had to stop talking, overcome with emotion.

Seated with us in the photograph are my peers in the Westminster Ensemble, who, under Mr. Boggs, sang a program of songs by Sondheim. On the way to a tour of Poland and Russia, we stopped in New York to see the Broadway revue SIDE BY SIDE BY SONDHEIM, when this picture was made. This photograph is a detail from a photo collage I made for Frank Boggs's retirement celebration. 

Other Blog Posts About Frank Boggs

• For Frank Boggs on his 94th Birthday (02/2021)
• Echoes of My Teacher's Voice(01/2019)
  
• Frank Boggs at 90 -- at 50, Frank sang "You Make Me Feel So Young" for his teenage choir; for his 90th birthday, I rewrote the lyrics for him (1/26/17)
  
• Drill it in or Tease it Out? This is a reflection on the way Frank taught us (10/1/13)
  
• Georgia Festival Chorus Celebrates "Legacy" (5/21/18) ends with links to reviews of Frank's performances that I've written over the years.

[See my Stephen Sondheim page.] 

Punching the Air: Teen Poet Imprisoned

Writer Ibi Zoboi and poet-activist Dr. Yusef Salaam collaborated on a young adult novel in poetry, Punching the Air, drawing on Salaam's experience. In 1989, he was one of the five black males in their early teens arrested for the rape and near-fatal beating of "the Central Park Jogger." I remember reading with incredulity -- not enough! -- that bands of feral black boys roamed the city nights looking for white people to assault; "wilding," they supposedly called it. "Wilding" turns out to have been just a reporter's extrapolation from a misunderstanding of one remark by one boy.

Recent movies - a documentary and a drama - tell the story how police jumped to conclusions, how prosecutors bullied the boys into confessions, how the press hyped the crime. During the trial, Donald Trump took out a full-page ad to call for a public lynching. But after more than ten years in prison, all the young men were exonerated and the true culprit, a white man, was imprisoned.

Zoboi and Salaam have refracted the first part of that story, updating it, universalizing it. The protagonist named Amal ("hope" in Arabic) is well-loved, well-read, an artist, but guilty of fighting back when white teens attack him and his friends. A white teenaged boy lies in a coma, and Amal lands in prison. The story is how Amal learns to fight back against the external walls of the prison system and the internal walls of doubt that suffocate his spirit.

Each chapter is a poem with enough in it to reward re-readings, but you don't have to read Punching the Air twice to get the story and the feelings. Sometimes you feel angry, sometimes you ache, sometimes you smile at the sweetness. Often a word in one poem becomes the topic for the next, drawing you from page to page with no pause to look back. But as you read, you'll pick up many strands that tie disparate chapters together. To read Punching the Air a second time is like stepping back to appreciate a mural like the one that Amal wants to paint (130).

I paint with words, too Amal tells us, relating his poetry to his drawings. Many of the poems are titled after works he studied in AP Art History class -- The Thinker, The Watch, The Scream-- though he angered his art teacher by asking whether anyone outside of Europe made art, a fair question. He imagines a Black Mona Lisa and a remix of his favorite painting Guernica to be about him and his friends, with "distorted faces and bodies / in war in war in war", but, like dust in Maya Angelou's poem, "we rise we rise we rise" (353).

The rising of dust is one motif that we see in several poems. Some poems develop the analogy of Amal's prior life with friends and family as "Africa," the court process as "the Middle Passage," and his arrival at prison as the stolen African ancestors' arrival at America (61, elsewhere). He takes hope from the "butterfly effect," i.e., the theory that waves created by a butterfly's wings can have outsized influence on destiny. He longs for super-powers to withstand the bullying and intimidation he experiences in prison. The real walls around him also are a symbol. His few allies in the prison become "walls" to him, and he also makes himself a wall. So drawing his art on walls becomes more than just a pasttime; it's an image for what he can make of his life. In one short poem, one in a series titled "Brotherhood" the metaphor of a wall helps to express a development in his friendship with his "four corners":

Brotherhood VI

And maybe
there are small
cracks in our walls
and we start to see
a sliver of light
shine through

in each other.

(338)

I have a personal reason to be especially affected by another theme in the poems -- how others see him. In our school's upper division, a young black man told the Senior class advisor that only one teacher in all his years at the school had ever "seen" him; I was not that teacher. I looked back on my time with him in Middle School, how I managed his oppositional behavior, how I encouraged his talents, how I made corrections with respect -- I wondered, what does "seeing" mean? Then I heard the poet Zoboi read "Clone" from Punching the Air, about how his teachers in fifth grade "watched" him "so hard, so close" after a playground fight "that I thought I was trying to break out of prison." The poem continues

Every dumb s--- I did
they thought it was because of

trouble at home
an absent father
a tired mother
not enough books
not enough vegetables
not enough sleep

They believed those lies about me

and made themselves
a whole other boy
in their minds
and replaced me with him

(56)

Echoing what I read in those newspaper accounts at the time of Dr. Salaam's arrest, Amal develops the idea of how the media sees him and the boy in the coma: "I am ink / He is paper...I am man / He is boy... I am criminal / He is victim...I am black / He is white" (20).

In a later poem, imagining himself on the slave ship, he addresses his tormentors: What do you see when you see me? / The enemy? The inner me? (91). Truly, I don't know -- yet --what I could have done or thought differently regarding that student in my class, but I recognize myself in those teachers, and him in this character.

In Amal's story, there's the art teacher, important for what she taught him, but who also laughed when he said that he wanted to do a whole mural instead of a paper portfolio (130). "I failed the class, and she failed me" (133). But a black woman who teaches creative writing and a guest professor in African garb capture Amal's imagination.

Reading the poems weeks after George Floyd suffocated with a policeman's knee on his neck, I was chagrined to read these two lines repeatedly throughout the book: "There's a stone in my throat / and a brick on my chest" (11, 410, passim).

For all the darkness, there's light here, too. Loving family, friendship in prison, inspiration for art, and a letter from Zenobia, the cute girl he was too timid to talk to in school. He sends her his portrait of her "to let her know that / I saw her / I see her / I remember her" (176). If "time moves you away from me," he writes to her, "I will always remember / you remembering me" (177).

That acrostic poem, each line starting with a letter from Zenobia's name, inspired my kids to write acrostics of their own. Punching the Air is a beautiful book for readers of any age, of any race.

Ibi Zoboi and Yusef Salaam. Punching the Air. New York: Balzer and Bray, 2020.

COVIDucation: Singing a New Song in a Foreign Land

 

"How do we sing the Lord's song in a foreign land?"  This plaintive question from Psalm 137 resonated when it showed up in the Episcopal Prayer Book's queue of Psalms last Saturday.  I'd just completed my 40th first week of teaching middle school, a week unlike any of the others.    

My song as a teacher has always been one I've believed in deeply: that writing is a process for discovering more about yourself, your world, and your beliefs, while reading enlarges your experience.

The foreign land is school during this pandemic.  Classes meet half as often, twice as long.  Half the kids attend on line a couple days, then on campus a couple days.  The ones on campus lug their bookbags past untouched lockers through a quiet hall where always before there was jostling, locker-slamming, gossip, high-fiving and general hubbub. Students meet just four of their classes one day, four the next, all 85-minutes long. That former hub of social interaction, the restroom, is now limited to occupancy by two.

[PHOTO: My lovely dog Brandy often joins morning prayer. The routine has been a comfort during this odd time; now it's an inspiration, too.]

Re-re-re-scheduling the start of school to reflect Georgia's having America's highest per capita spread of the virus, our leadership team wisely gave the students a day off on Friday, giving teachers time to reflect. What did we get right? What do we need now? I was grateful for the time to reflect. By the end of Friday, I'd had a breakthrough.

As my friend Susan observed, "It's like solving a crossword puzzle." Yes! "Across" is pretty easy - the literature we mete out in 20-page reading assignments every two days; language arts to practice; time for applying techniques in writing.

But "down" has been keeping me up at night. How do you keep kids engaged 85 minutes, half of them socially distanced in cloth face coverings (CFCs or "masks"), half projected on the Active Board?

By 3:30 Friday, I'd found a sort of crossword format for planning, and things clicked into place. I can see what the students need to experience in order to grow as readers and writers. Thanks to our leadership team and our technical staff, I have several options for how to connect on-line learners with the face-to-face ones.

On Saturday morning, after weeks of anxiety and waking up at 2 or 3 AM, I felt OK. I turned again to the Book of Common Prayer for the morning routine of prescribed readings and prayers that have been a comfort in stressful times. Not on the list, Psalm 33 kept bubbling up.

Psalm 33 proclaims, "Sing to the Lord a new song." I literally did, noticing in the Hymnal chants for weekday morning prayer that, as a Sunday singer for 40 years, I'd never had occasion to sing. I was delighted to discover expressive plain chant for "The Venite" and "The Third Song of Isaiah." Sight-reading, I sang at the darkness on that Saturday "Arise, shine, for your light has come." Like a crossword puzzle, the music works across and down. Going "down" through verses long and short, the chant is flexible to allow for length and emphasis, verse by verse -- as my new system is flexible to bend with the needs of the class.

Thank God, I'm feeling better about the year ahead than I have done for months. A colleague said on the work day, "We're all first - year teachers again!" So true: as I did in the first couple years of teaching, I've rolled out of bed as early as 3 AM to prepare lessons for the day; I've crashed as early as 8:30 at day's end.

Coincidentally, the same morning, I broke through on an actual crossword puzzle with the theme "Global Menu," where MousSEATTLE intersected CaraMELROSE. 

For related stories, see my blogposts

• Theology of Crosswords: A Shortz Sermon (03/2010)
• Cartoon Puzzles: The Real Intelligent Design(01/2007)

Middle School Teacher Considers "Bored and Brilliant"

The author of Bored and Brilliant distinguishes between the mind that wanders because you're bored with some tedious activity, and the mind that's "bored" because you crave the next "hit" or "like." In one, your mind is free to make up stories about what you might do, what author Manoush Zomorodi calls "autobiographical planning"; in the other, you are tethered to a device that allows others to pull your chain. One kind of boredom is creative; the other kind comes from an appetite ramped up by software engineers to draw our attention back to their products.

The tyranny of messaging isn't new. The Islamic poet Rumi lamented 800 years ago, "I have lived too long where I may be reached." Zomorodi, drawing on experts and on listener responses to her Bored and Brilliant podcasts from NPR, reports references to the phenomenon of boredom as far back as ancient Rome, though Charles Dickens first coined the English word in Bleak House (1853). Others referred to it as "nausea" (Sartre), "idleness" (Kierkegaard), "tamed longing without any particular object" (Schopenhauer), and "the noonday demon" that gave rise to sin according to early church fathers (Zomorodi 16).

In one eye-opening experiment, subjects found more "out of the box" solutions to a problem after 20 minutes of reading aloud a list of phone numbers. The "executive" brain, occupied in executing this tedious task, left the rest of the mind free to daydream.

That's what made heaven out of summer afternoons of hot, sticky, smelly, repetitive work in my dad's chemical company. Tightening lids on hundreds of soap bottles, pressure washing dozens of 55-gallon drums, bleaching the bleachers at South Decatur High School -- I was rapt in my own imagination, writing scripts, imagining alternative futures for myself, replaying scenes from my life with different outcomes.

[Photo: West Chemicals in Atlanta, where Huff Road meets Ellsworth Industrial Blvd, 1972, site of many years' productive teenage boredom for me.]

Prodded by long-distance runner Peter Sagal, host of NPR's comedy show Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, I've unplugged while I'm out on my bike. Before I ever had a smart phone, I wrote plays, songs, comedy sketches, and curriculum for my students during my long rides. That all stopped during the years when I tuned into news, Pandora, and Peter Sagal. Now I use the phone only to record the ideas that have come to me while my body has been engaged in cycling.

Here's another reason to appreciate the Episcopal Church. With experience, we come to know the responses, collects, creeds, and prayers by heart. You can tune in; but much of the time, a line in Scripture or the sermon sends your imagination off on a tangent -- something to write about, or a solution to a classroom problem, or remembrance of someone you need to visit. Suddenly you're bulleting ideas in the bulletin and you miss the cue to stand for the hymn. When the closing prayer sends you out into the world to love and serve the Lord, you're ready!

For this teacher of Middle School English and Drama, the key takeaways are

• To read slowly from a page and to write by hand, requiring the mind to filter material, gets better engagement and retention than electronic substitutes (48-49).
• The way we read screens, hopping around from sentence to picture to hyperlink, prevents us from close reading. Readers who used an eBook reported being just as interested in the story as those who read from paper, but were far less able to identify the order of incidents in the story (47).
• "Priority" is a singular word. Zomorodi cites the idea of Essentialism developed by author Greg McKeown, who shakes his head over a mayor who claimed to have "32 priorities" for her new administration (155). This made me think what English activity has priority: analysis of grammar? appreciation of literature? writing essays? writing fiction? building vocabulary? I see a clear line, now: Everything in the course is feeding the students' store of ideas and references for writing.
• Boredom and silence that is attentive to incidental sounds around you can feed creativity. There's another kind of meditative silence, directed inward, that shuts creativity down.

Zomorodi previews the conclusion of the book early on:

If our children are constantly engaged with bits and bytes of information, what is happening to their ability to imagine, concentrate deeply, reflect on past experiences, decide how to apply those lessons to future goals, and figure out what they want for themselves, their relationships, and life (5)?

That looks to me like a lot of what my kids should be writing about, one way or another, all year. Another assertion by Zomorodi mirrors our school's mission statement: "We crave reflective time; we seek balance; we want a life full of joy and curiosity" (11).

Zomorodi, Manoush. Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive and Creative Self. New York: Picador, 2017.

Before You Say Something You'll Regret...: Crucial Conversations

"Take a deep breath, Mr. Smoot. You're about to say something you'll regret."

I whipped around from the 7th grade girl who had made me so mad to face the boy who spoke those words behind my back. He was smiling, but very red in the face.

He continued, "Count to ten."

I did. Then I apologized to the class, laughed at my foolish reaction, thanked him, and did my best to meet the girl's needs. She only wanted to do well, and my instruction had not told her how.

That's my own contribution to the trove of similar anecdotes that show effective ways to handle conversation when it goes "crucial." These anecdotes often made me tear up, because nothing gets to me like forgiveness and reconciliation. There's the one about the wife who wants to feel appreciated more than desired (98); the wife who finds a nearby no-tell motel charged on her husband's account (149); and the mother whose daughter screams, "I finally get a boyfriend and you want to take him away from me" (170)

The authors slice these anecdotes up, filling the in-betweens with observations of what's going wrong, and what can make it go right. So each chapter is a kind of story, with a heartwarming denoument.

The basics are all present in my own anecdote. Look at yourself and others to see if a conversation has gone wrong. Apologize. Make it safe, expressing that you don't want the other to feel badly, and you do share a common goal (and if you don't agree on a specific goal, make the goal more general). Find out,Why would a rational, decent human being do what they're doing? I've always known, true authority is based on mutual respect.

Here are a few gems from the book:

• Sarcasm is a form of silence (75)
• Respect is like air: You don't notice it, but when it's gone, it's all people think about (79-80)
• When a conversation turns crucial, "step out of the content" to examine why there's "silence" or "violence," sure signs that someone doesn't feel safe (92 and before)

Some of the book's lessons are good for teaching my students about persuasive rhetoric. There's a list of ways to win an argument by hurting everyone and shutting down true dialogue:

• Stack the deck with our supporting facts
• Exaggerate
• Use inflammatory terms
• Appeal to authority
• Attack the opponent
• Make hasty generalizations
• Attack a straw man

I'd add "What about?" as in, "Oh? What about that time when...." It occurs to me as I type this up that I hear NPR interviewers sidestepping this kind of rhetoric every time they interview partisans on the news.

One of the many stories contributed by readers concerns using the principles in this book to compose a speech for an international audience filled with defensive delegates (222). For teaching persuasive writing, these are understandable notions: make the other side feel "safe" and mirror the other side's stories.

The authors' use of the word "story" is helpful. It's better for teaching writing than the dry word "thesis." Facts don't have power to make us emotional, but the stories we make from them do. If you're feeling strongly, then examine your story. Often, there's more than one story to explain the facts (115).

Also, vocabulary matters. "Angry" doesn't give you enough information; "surprised" and "embarrassed" give you some things you can address (114).

Some of the strongest stories and lessons follow the index. In an afterword, the authors tell what they've learned in a decade of teaching this book. These are strong:

• It's not only when it matters most that we do our worst. The author blew up at a minor $3 charge (224).
• Ready to launch a tirade at his 15 year old son, the father took a moment to examine the boy's story. When his own body visibly relaxed, the boy transformed, "no longer a monster -- he was a vulnerable, beautiful, precious boy" (226).
• You can't make someone else have dialogue with you. But weeks of the father's approaching the withdrawn, sarcastic daughter, "softened" her to the point that she felt safe to tell him her story (230).

One author tells us that some readers who thank him for the way the book has helped in their lives also admit that they've not done much more than skim the book. He says that's okay. We all have good ideas of what best behavior looks like, and just the reminder that a conversation has turned crucial is enough (228).

When that happens, take a deep breath. Count to ten. And start over.

Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When the Stakes are High by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler. Second Edition. New York: McGraw Hill, 2012.

"Forge": Friendship and Fire

Ten minutes into Laurie Halse Anderson's YA novel Forge, I'd laughed out loud four times, gasped and cried. Those reactions mix in about that same proportion throughout the novel, along with "awwws" and some outrage. Comparing this to Chains, its predecessor in Anderson's trilogy Seeds of America, I find the same skillful manipulation of her story to fit with events of the War for Independence, with more playfulness and a whole lot more fart jokes.

[Image:   Laurie Halse Anderson. Forge. New York: Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2010.]

The jokes are a guy thing, natural to Anderson's narrator Curzon. In Chains, the intense story of Isabel, a girl enslaved, Curzon was comic relief, with his ridiculous floppy red hat, an earring, military garb too big, and a mouth on him. Even at the end of that story, sick and starving in a military prison, he's making jokes. Now he's "almost 16," meaning 11 months short of his birthday, enrolled in the Continental Army, longing to reunite with Isabel.

Friendship leavens Curzon's suffering from the elements, privations, and hostility from a few of the other teenaged boys in his company. Foremost among his allies is Ebenezer "Eben" Woodruff, the young soldier that Curzon saves early in the novel. Eben's gratitude is as boundless as his chatter, expressed often with arm-numbing punches to Curzon's shoulder.

A gulf opens between the two friends in a passage that anticipates how the "seeds of America" in 1777 will grow through Civil War to Civil Rights to those today who pit "law and order" against "systemic racism." When Eben argues that runaway slaves break the law, Curzon counters, "Bad laws deserve to be broken," just as the King's decrees are being rebuffed by the colonies. Eben asserts that "running away from their rightful master is not the same as America wanting to be free of England." Curzon falls silent a moment.

I almost told him then; told him that I and my parents and my grandparents had all been born into bondage, that my great-grandparents had been kidnapped from their homes and forced into slavery while his great-grandparents decided which crops to plant and what to name their new cow. (66)

If they'd had the phrase "white privilege," Eben still wouldn't understand. When Eben counters that bondage is "God's will," Curzon walks away: "You're not my friend." The ugly and painful chapters that follow make the friendship, when it returns, all the more deep and sweet.

To fit the arc of Curzon's story to a day-by-day account of events in 1777-1778, Anderson paces her chapters to make the personal coincide with the historical so that jaw-dropping surprises don't feel random. Instead, for example, we think, "It makes sense they would be there!" Anderson shows off in a playful way, meting out highpoints to fall on significant dates. There's peace-making and good will on Christmas, very bad luck on Friday the 13th, something having to do with the heart -- no spoilers, here -- on February 14th, and, for May 1st, more than one reason to think that our narrator has Maypoles on his mind. The way Anderson plays with her material to hit these marks adds another pleasure to the novel.

Anderson plays with the title, too. When my seventh graders read Chains, there's always a bubbling up of energy as the kids realize how many ways the title appears in the text, relating to story and themes. That game continues, as Chains are made at a Forge. Much of the novel takes place at Valley Forge. Curzon, who once worked for a blacksmith, makes himself a black "Smith" when he enlists with an alias. The hardships of military life are a "forge," says a fellow soldier, to be "a test of our mettle" (121). Lead antagonist James Bellingham has forged a metal collar for his slave. By training during the spring, ragtag soldiers are "forged" into an army. Then, forged notes are part of Curzon's escape plans.

Of course, there are no forges, no chains, without fire, and a singular passage about fire and chains confirms the strength of the fire that burns in Curzon.  He tells of hearing a story from Benny, the runt of the company whom Curzon admires for courage. It's little Benny who shames a bully to tears for shirking (140).  Curzon bites his tongue to keep from laughing when Benny, trying to fit in with the big boys, cusses "like a granny," Oh, foul, poxy Devil! (95).  Curzon, who cannot read, listens intently when Benny tells stories to his mates. 
The story of the Titan Prometheus, chained to a rock for sharing fire with the needy, comes to Curzon's mind at a moment of intense hopelessness.  Bellingham has outmaneuvered him: since Curzon is inured to pain, Bellingham threatens to punish Isabel for any misstep by Curzon.  Moments later, Curzon stares into a fireplace and recalls the story, though not the name, of a "fellow ... chained to a rock where an eagle ate out his liver, which grew back every night, and so on through eternity."  Curzon reflects,

When Benny finished his story... I did not know what I would have done if somebody shackled me to a mountain and sent an eagle to eat my insides, day after day after day.

Now I knew.  I would fight the eagle and the chains and that mountain as long as I had breath. (199)

This inner fire is important to Laurie Halse Anderson's trilogy.  In education forums and in public discussion of novels and movies, people this year have questioned whether white authors should be writing about the experiences of people of color.  Anderson, a white woman, gives us in her epigraphs samples from primary sources to show us how close she comes to real lives and real voices of the time, black and white.  She has given her black, male, teenage protagonist an appealing voice and strong agency in his own salvation; there is no White Savior, here.

Anderson's other works include memoirs of her own experience with abuse.  When she writes about Curzon's despair and anger under someone else's absolute power over his body, she writes with authority.   In Chains, both Isabel and her nemesis Madam Lockton suffer arbitrary decrees and physical beatings.  In Forge, it's different. As Isabel fills Curzon in on a particularly violent slave trader, she stops talking.  Curzon is mystified:

I was overcome by an unsettling sensation, as if some giant had picked up the whole of the earth and tilted it.  She'd been hurt, scarred on the inside of her spirit, and I did not know how to help her.  (189)

Curzon lacks our culture's generic phrase sexual abuse for what Isabel experienced.  But Curzon knows it when he sees Isabel forced to lather Bellingham's face while the odious man soaks in a tub. Giving orders, the man casually pets Isabel.  Curzon barely contains himself, thinking

Take your hand off her, you foul whoreson.
"Of course, sir," I said.   (207)

Though victimized, Isabel is no victim.  When she and Curzon make risky plans, Curzon says, "We should wait... for our luck to turn" (270).  He observes, with admiration, that others, female and male, would have "blubbered" and "backed out":

Not Isabel. The reverse side of her pigheaded stubbornness was unshakable courage that was worthy of a general.
"If our luck does not turn for the good on its own," she said, "we'll make it turn." (270)

For the finale, Anderson whips up action, humor, surprises, poetic justice, and a perfect conversion of her major themes, forge, freedom, and guys. As the story ends, Curzon is once again laughing, "walking out of Valley Forge the way I walked into it, with friends."

[See my response to Ashes, concluding book of the trilogy, 06/2020]

Asynchronicity for Deep Dive Education in Middle School

Our Head of Middle School, meeting virtually with me and other department chairs last week, posed a couple of questions. Now that we have had "distance learning" through internet apps for a full quarter, how might learning next year benefit from the experience? The second question seemed unrelated: As our school has provided a strong network of services and teachers to serve students with special learning needs, how can we do the same for highly-motivated students who want more than the usual classroom experience?

The whole time we were meeting, I was nominally "in class," but free to talk because my students had "asynchronous" work to do, editing their portfolios and reading a chapter. They had nearly an hour to work on their own before they would join me for a short synchronous videoconference, part spoken discussion in "break out" rooms, and part written comments on "chat." Students who missed it all did it all by email later in the week.

Later, I saw that the asynchronous techniques of distance learning could be the key to creating a "deep dive" experience for students motivated enough to want it. The answers to all of our Head's practical questions, printed below in italics, fell in to place:

• What are the pre-requisites? What is the interview process? What restrictions are there on the program? Participating fully in regular synchronous classes during the first quarter, students who self-identify as interested in the program are evaluated for traits of curiosity, near-mastery of the skills exercised during class, and willpower to work independently.
• What personnel are involved? In our school, our classes rotate in a cycle of seven days, and each class meets six times. Students who qualify for this program come to half of classes in their field for three days, keeping up with reading and discussion, other days reporting to the media center or a middle school classroom set aside for asynchronous study. During the second quarter, they spend that time researching broadly in their field. They will need a study advisor -- not necessarily the same as their classroom teacher -- and, being middle schoolers, some adult in the room. By the end of the second quarter, they and their study advisor will have mapped out a course of study: sources to read, or people to meet, or data to collect.
• How does this align with extant curriculum, especially with classes in the higher grades? Throughout the third quarter, and some time beyond, the students will do the deep work of following the map they made in the second quarter, collecting data, quotes, impressions, pictures -- whatever -- going deeply into a tangent to the same subject that their classmates are studying. They're not "getting ahead," but going deep.
  
• In the fourth quarter, they collect what they've learned into a form that can be presented to classmates, teachers, parents. Tools that we're using for distance learning could be useful, here. Over time, the school will have accumulated a library of videos and virtual books for use in the classroom.

While the terminology of "asynchronous" learning comes out of the world of on-line experiences that may or may not happen "in real time," technology only facilitates the kind of educational experience that, in my own life, has been most valuable. Looking back through my own secondary education, I realize that all of my ah-ha moments happened because the teacher got out of the way. While we read Faulkner with Mr. Scott, he had us choose another Faulkner novel of our own choice, to write on a topic of our own devising. Mr. Boggs sent me off to put together a program of songs by Sondheim. (Read my tribute, 11/2015). At Duke, Professor Holley assigned a research paper on the first day of class that had to be about something on Duke's campus that had never been researched before. My first draft, due in December was 20 pages long; my second, in May, was 40 with 40 more pages of notes from letters, interviews, and yellowed original documents. (Read my tribute to Dr. Holley 09/2013) A graduate professor at Millsaps College freed me to research solutions to the three greatest classroom challenges that I'd identified during my first three years of teaching, resulting in essays that still fuel what I do.

The program I've laid out, it hits me now, is pretty close to work I've done with all the students in my regular classes. My 8th graders came to two classes a week prepared to learn about American history through documents, but the other two classes, they circulated between conferencing with me and going to the library to work on research for a pair of related papers, one per semester.

At St. Andrew's in Jackson, science teacher John Davis assisted fifth graders who had passions in an area to find grown-up experts in the field who became their "colleagues" on a project, and presented them with much fanfare to a live audience, child and adult both on stage. (I remember especially the one with the life-size papier mache whale.)

So, problems solved. I'm going to ride my bike this morning, so that I can meet my synchronous responsibilities in the afternoon.

Miles Morales Behind the Spider-Man Mask

Putting aside that Miles Morales has the super-strength and wall-climbing abilities that naturally come with a radioactive spider's bite, he's also fifteen years old. In the novel Miles Morales: Spider-Man (Scholastic, 2017) the author Jason Reynolds grounds his super-hero story in believable daily reality of a teenage boy of color, a scholarship student boarding at a mostly-white academy.

Yes, Miles can leap above the backstop to dunk a ball, but when he comes down, it's to his dorm room to deal with unwashed jeans, deodorant streaks on his shirt, stubble, eating, working while his friends go to a party, falling asleep over homework. He doubts whether the girl he likes can like him, and whether his poem for English class is any good.

[Photo: The cover of Miles Morales: Spider-Man, and the cover artist Kadir Nelson at work.]

But Miles deals with deeper self-doubts stemming from others' doubts about him. At age 13, applying for school, he wrote

...I know there are people who look at [me and my family] a certain way. The reason why is because my father wasn't always the man he is today. He was a person who didn't have anyone to steer him away from the traps of our community. Even though my neighborhood is a beautiful place to grow up, sometimes it can get complicated. And my father and his brother fell victim to the street, becoming teenage thieves, bringing problems to our neighborhood, and all of New York city. (101)

Miles writes how a life of crime caught up with his uncle Aaron. "This part of my family is also a part of me. The same fearlessness that led them to crime is what leads me to excellence." It's a sweetly earnest letter, weaponized to shame Miles when the principal accuses him of a petty theft.

Miles is not alone with his doubts. In nightmares, Uncle Aaron tells him, You're just like me. When, in his Spider-Man tights, Miles breaks a sneaker thief's wrist and beats him bloody, Miles is ashamed of himself for losing control, and haunted by his uncle's voice, You're just like me (127). He visits the county prison to meet a cousin he never knew existed, who also has nightmares in which the prison guard is "telling me I ain't never gon' be nothing," something the guard says during the day, only "in my dream, he got my daddy's voice [saying] 'You're just like me'" (195).


Finding the source of these self-doubts is the main action of the book. We're in the Marvel Universe, so there's a super-villain conspiracy involved; but we don't need to believe in magic when neighborhood men all share stories of being suspended from school. Had the teachers asked why a black boy might sleep in class, fight, or refuse to read aloud, they might have learned that he worked all night, that a white boy spit on him, or that he was ashamed of his poor reading ability (207).

The cousin in prison tells the same sort of story from his school days, tying school authorities to those that locked him up with men who all look like him, "if you know what I mean" (194). The creepy history teacher, who preaches that slavery benefitted both masters and "grafeful" slaves (117), opines that the American prison system is "the new, much smarter, form of slavery" (155).


While Miles's journey of discovery stretches out over the course of the novel, what keeps us turning pages is just the love of the characters. At school, there's Miles's jovial roommate Ganke and Alicia, the outspoken socially-conscious president of the school's poetry club. We enjoy the eccentric English teacher Miss Blaufuss, and the sympathetic librarian Mrs. Triplett. The dad is affectionate but demanding, making sure Miles learns "Helping your neighbors is the most heroic thing you can do," even if it's just cleaning up garbage left by careless sanitation workers (8). His mother, who doesn't know his secret, is wise but worried:

"I know," she said with a sigh.... "We know you're sorry. But what we don't know is what's going on with you." Her eyes glassed as she stared at Miles.
My uncle's death.
My school.
My teacher.
My newfound incarcerated cousin.
My superpowers.
"Nothing," Miles said. "Well, I mean, I guess I just feel so much pressure. But I'm ... fine."
"You sure?" His mother leaned in, her eyes lasering through the layers of him. Through the mask. (Reynolds 132)

Most of all, we love the vulnerable young man Miles that we alone can see behind his "mask."

[Photo from JasonWritesBooks.com: Jason Reynolds.]

Of course, Miles wears a literal Spider-Man mask, and poet Jason Reynolds sometimes uses literal elements of the story as metaphors. He sets the pattern with his novel's epigraph, a poem by African American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar that begins "We wear the mask that grins and lies" -- true for Spider-Man, true for a young black man responding to white assumptions.

When Miles asks the librarian about spiders, she suggests "the symbolism of the web" (111). Miles may feel alone with his troubles, but the metaphor explains what we see, how he's integral to his family and community.

The supernatural source of Miles's nightmares is a metaphor for experiences that weigh down black teens of color in real life. 

Then, Miss Blaufuss's poetry assignments draw significant thoughts from Miles. Directed to discover the origins of his own name, he learns that miles means "soldier" and morales means "moral": he's a warrior for good. Given ten minutes to write about love in a Korean sijo -- three lines, each 14-16 syllables -- Miles thinks first of his mother, but "I love you, Ma" is only four syllables. He "finds his groove" recalling what his father said about the neighborhood, and he writes, "To my father, love sometimes means--" when time's up (57). An important part of the plot concerns Miles' effort to deliver Alicia the poem that expresses his feelings for her.


Jason Reynolds on his website addresses the many kids he meets who say they hate reading, when they really mean, they hate boring books. He promises not to write boring books. In a profile of the author for the New York Times (28 October 2019), Concepcion de Leon writes, "The best-selling writer ...wants black teenagers and kids to know that he sees them." He "attempts to portray the scope of their lives -- sometimes including guns and violence but also happiness and laughter." Reynolds says, "There's always a joke somewhere. You don't go through what black and brown people have been through in this country and survive without understanding how to tap into joy." He also shows boys "crying or feeling uncertainty" because "I need boys to know that's O.K."


I hope he reaches black teens. I hope the novel also reaches white teens, like those over the years who've told me that racism is over. We need to see what some classmates may be experiencing behind a mask.

[I wrote what I know about the experience of young men like Miles Morales from my side of the color line in a blogpost The Privilege is Mine (12/2017)]