May 4, 2011
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Happy Birthday Mom!!! Your Buddy misses you!!! = )1 Are you kind?
2 Yeesh.
3 Well, that was random, but you have to warm up before you pitch late innings. Happy Birthday, Mom. In your honor, I will make today’s DN about kindness, and how I used your wisdom yesterday.
4 Yesterday I had a phone call from a desperate special ed teacher who needed me to sit in on an IEP next Thursday morning at 10:30 a.m. The last IEP I attended was right before we left for Easter. At that time they promised me that I had done enough for the year. She almost broke down, because she had just returned from the second of two funerals for extremely close family, and her work had backed up.
5 Well…been there.
6 Ironically, 10:30 a.m. is my support class, and also their first day of working on group projects, which must be completed in five school days, seven days altogether. Bad day for me not to be with them. I thought it through, and here is what I told her:
7 I told her that I would do it, and not to worry. I will get a local teacher on campus to sub and get my students started.
8 The second I hung up the phone, another student came in asking if I could like and comment on some project she did on You Tube. I said, “I’ll have it done by the end of lunch.”
9 Three football players asked for grade checks the period prior. I dropped everything I was doing and calculated each grade.
10 Within seconds, three girls approached me and asked if I could supervise an ITS practice at 3 p.m. Granted, it was one of the best kids I had last year, so I said, “The International Thespian Society?”
11 The student I had just giggled and said, “Yeah!” They marveled that I knew what the letters stood for.
12 I told the girls that I had to think if I had any other commitments after school, when the girl on the computer interrupted and wanted to show me how to access her You Tube project, and how I was to “like” it and comment on it for her. The other girls waited patiently while I juggled that one. While the girl on the computer kept talking to me, I looked up at the other girl and said, “When?”
13 “3:15?” came the swift reply, while the girl at the computer continued explaining in detail what I needed to do to make her stuff appear on this You Tube thingy.The question mark indicated a tacit, “Please?”
14 I looked back up at the other three girls and said, “I’ll be there.” They smiled, giggled, and left the room with a bunch of “Thank-you’s”.
15 After the entire menage left, the room fell silent.
16 Two angels from Heaven floated down with one of those devices you see at amusement parks that have a cartoon hammer, and when you bring the hammer down, it shoots a little puck up to a bell, such as you would see in a Roger Rabbit fantasy.
17 At first I couldn’t believe that I was actually seeing live angels, but once I accepted it, I took the hammer and laid it down.
18 The puck hit the bell on the first try, and all sorts of buzzers and whistles occurred simultaneously, and then quite swiftly a cloud formed around and under my feet, and I drifted off…
19 Oh, oh, what I want to know…is…
20 Are you kind?
24 I wound up later on in the school Theatre sitting and watching unpolished drama skits that go up next week. It was absolutely grand! At center stage sat a lone chair, and nothing else.
25 Time Travel: My very first day of my very first drama gig way back-in-the day: I remember the Principal’s assistant handing me keys to the Mills High School Auditorium in Millbrae. He had wanted me to direct the school play while the regular teacher was enjoying a sabbatical.
26 When I first began, I thought that the idea of a sabbatical was awesome.
27 That was about the last I heard of it.
28 Anyway, I remember clutching the keys to the place, and then going over, all alone, turning the key, and going inside.
29 The first thing I saw was an old chair at center stage, one of those chairs you would see in the dressing room in an old movie about people putting on a play.
30 I remember running down to the ray-o-stat light controls and bringing up an entire bank of lights.
31 NO! TOO BRIGHT!
32 That’s better. I unlocked the bank and found one feathery beam that I placed at a slight angle on the chair.
33 I then saw a bank called “cyc lights”. Cyc lights would light up a cyclorama, a cloth backdrop that could be used for projecting clouds, stars, or just colors or slides.
34 Mills had a cyc that flew in, so I flew it in.
35 I looked back at the controls and found “blue”.
36 Slowly, I brought up a deep, soulful blue cyclorama behind the old chair in the single beam ellipsoid.
37 And then I went out into the audience and smiled. I must have moved the chair at a thousand different angles that day, and returned to the audience watching my first real Show.
38 A portrait of…
39 And yesterday I blinked, and the cyc was blue, and the chair was again there, only it was in our Theatre, and it was indeed yesterday.
40 What a wonderful moment. Alpha. Omega.
41 It was wonderful for a couple of reasons.
42 It was wonderful because I was kind.
43 It was wonderful because each time I blinked, I saw something different.
44 It was wonderful because of all the years in between.
45 Words won’t work.
46 Are you kind?
47 Happy Birthday, Mom. You passed your kindness to many. For that and so much else, I love you.
48 Peace.
~ Your Buddy~
