May 15, 2008
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1 What are the odds that a teacher is actually happy beyond words this far into May?
2 Just happened.
3 In some sorta strange way, things just got better.
4 Maybe it’s the dawning of the end of the school year.
5 Maybe it’s the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.
6 Goodness knows.
7 I feel like I just got back from the BEACH!
8 Baseball. Nice weather. Baseball. Drama at YB. Springtime. Baseball. Drama…
9 Somethin’.
10 Musicals.
11 May.
12 Baseball.
13 Drama.
14 Somebody out there is doing HAIR in the next few weeks.
15 Some of the best songs in Broadway history are from that show.
16 I told my freshmen today that in the Broadway hit HAIR, there exists a song called The Flesh Failures (Let the Sun Shine In) in which the lead character has died in a war, and the entire cast pulls together to question war.
17 The backing vocals use Romeo’s last words: Eyes look your last; arms take your last embrace…while the lyrics proper continue on, and suddenly the cast moves into the last words of Hamlet, The rest is silence…
18 We starve look, at one another short of breath,walking proudly in our winter coats wearing smells from laboratories, facing a dying nation, of moving paper fantasies, listening to the new told lies, with supreme visions of lonely tunes…
19 And if you KNOW those songs, let the rhythm overtake your being. Shakespeare serves as a backdrop with those amazing quotes.
20 For the record, every single last day of school, since my first year, finished with a huge tribute to Shakespeare, followed by a showing of Franco Zefferelli’s masterpiece, The Taming of the Shrew. I would come in the day after the end of the school year and would clean up, organize, and get prepared for the beginning of the following year. Every single year the my last duty as a teacher would be to write the words of Hamlet on the board:
The rest is silence.
—Hamlet
21 This class will also receive that privilege, but because they’ve been SO amazing, I’m thinking of a way to incorporate HAIR into their appreciation for the Bard.
22 The rest is silence.
23 Peace Mercutio, peace…thou talks of nothing…
24 Indeed.
25 In some sorta strange way, things just got better.
26 Peace.
~H~
http://www.xanga.com/bharrington
