1980s Travel Club

When I was a freshman at Denison I gained entry to the Denison Singers in my first week of college. I soon learned that the 16-member group would be jetting off to Europe for a nearly-month long singing tour during our January Term. Our conductor, universally known by the pronunciation of his initials, WO, had chosen an ambitious program of challenging music. He had decided to celebrate the centennial of the birth of composer Igor Stravinsky, pairing up pieces of this modern music-maker’s work with medieval and Renaissance pieces of the same sacred texts. This music was difficult, but it was so fun to be in a real college group, with very good singers, and get to know these big college sophomores, juniors and seniors. This WO certainly put the “ecce” in eccentric (okay, that was a joke that just fell flat…hmmm…I was going for something like he put the glam in glamorous, and ‘ecce’ means “behold!” in Latin, so I was hoping it might work to say, “behold this interesting eccentric man!” but as jokes go…I think that is enough about that.). Back to this eccentric and music-loving professor.

Throughout the fall semester, if we had a bad rehearsal, which we seemed to have regularly, I learned we could count on some stinging mimeographed memo from WO delivered to our mailboxes the following day (ahhh…remember the purple ink and smell of the mimeograph? This is obviously the days before wanton Xeroxing and certainly before the advent of e-mail!). The memo would generally say something like, “We are 37% through our rehearsal time and you are decidedly not 37% ready for our concerts!” He would chide and chastise us and hope we might spend more time on the Latin texts, or the German folk songs.

There was one memo though that has became legendary in the annals of WO-dom (and there is a colorful and considerable imaginary file folder in every Denison Singers’ head about his marvelous turns of phrases) and he essentially wondered if we should “abort the singing group” and become a travel club????? During the break at our next rehearsal many of the Singers thought that was a really good idea—we could travel and see Europe and other exotic climes and unburden ourselves from the difficult music of Palestrina and Brahms! Over the next few years, that line got tossed around with glee every time we encountered a difficult piece of music (which by the way, many of us wondered from whence WO foundeth many of the unusual pieces to which he introduced us—a favorite lyric in one piece my senior year was, “Lie low, marmot fat…”)

Well, this last weekend a “rump parliament” of the 1980s Travel Club communed in New York on the occasion of my Spring Break ’09. Indeed, if you are a regular reader of the blog, you know that it is not uncommon for the Singers to indulge in reunions. Every few years WO invites all the members who ever participated in the group (from its inception in 1961 with a young WO to his retirement in 2003) to come back for a reunion and to work on a concert. I have missed only one of these (in 2001 I had to choose between a trip to China and the Singers Reunion) in 20 years. Just in the last few years alone we have had reunions in 2003, 2004, 2006, and 2008. We never did disband the singing group, but many of us have made reunions into a virtual travel club to visit each other.

My friend Tracy says the group was “magical.” Tracy was one of the seniors in my freshman year, and as I have oft referred to this lovely friend, she was the “Earth Mother” of the Denison Singers. What made it magical? How does it still influence us? Wasn’t it just another singing group?

Oh, my. It is hard to say what it is all about, but this last weekend, in my closing days of my marvelous spring break, a group of us once again got together to swap stories about our youth, our European tour, WO, and how the group has touched our lives over the last 25 years.

Tracy, a music teacher just a few miles away from Denison, organized this trip. Tracy is one of those teachers who lives and breathes her love for children. I love to call her from Jordan to see what the little ones will be studying in her class. Inevitably she is speaking gently to some child, helping some first grader to have a brighter day. Heidi came from North Carolina. Heidi was the most sophisticated person I knew that freshman year at college. I mean—she knew German, and from the German folk songs we sang in the group, I wanted to learn German too. Heidi had designed her own major and incorporated biology and ethics and philosophy and religion, and as an advisor to me in orientation encouraged me to sign up for Dr. Eisenbeis, the professor who had the biggest impact on me that first semester. We were going to meet up with two New Yorkers in the bunch—who both were freshmen too when I was a senior. It felt like having three generations together. Scott is an executive in mid-town Manhattan, married to a sweet Denison Singer (from my class) who couldn’t come the other night because she was performing in Connecticut. Sarah was my first great New York friend in life, and teaches at a progressive school in New York. Our currency has always been laughter between us. Rounding out our Travel Club reunion was our friend Rick (a master at humor and hyperbole) who was also a newbie freshman in that semester WO nearly “abort[ed]” the singing group. Rick brought his partner Jim, traveling from Philadelphia. We enjoyed an afternoon and evening together reminiscing and marveling at the passage of time.

Lo those many years ago in college Sarah had had a mad crush on Rick (as Tracy quipped, “He left a string of broken hearts, honey!”) and they had not seen each in over 20 years. So here we were—what bonded us together after 20 years? What did this group do for us? What had it mattered?

I know for me being in that group inspired and compelled me to want to create other group experiences like that. As a freshman I decided I wanted to teach, and without knowing it, over the years doing plays and teaching and traveling with students, I have created my own version of WO’s life and career. It has been a consuming life and career, not especially financially profitable when I see the bonuses many people get, but I like to think I created positive group experiences for my students like the Denison Singers. And those experiences mattered—we carved out time for each other simply to remind each other how much it mattered.

On Saturday I attended the wedding of a student who graduated from Charlotte Latin in 1996. Over the years we have never gone more than a year without a visit and catch-up. This bride, the glowing Elizabeth, introduced me to her fella a few years ago—I knew then that this was a match made in heaven.

It is an immensely blessed thing to be invited to the wedding of a former student. I remember attending the wedding of Audra, a treasure from way back at Gaston Day, in 1996, just after I had left North Carolina. And there have been the Coyle weddings, and singing in all of the Enszer weddings—and it is one of the crowning joys of the close relationships I have enjoyed over the years.

But this wedding on Saturday—Elizabeth’s wedding—came at a good time.

In the last two weeks I had briefly questioned a couple times the teaching gig, and especially the teaching in a private school thing. At KA we don’t have a pension plan, and that doesn’t paint a rosy picture for retirement, or for long-time tenure in Jordan. Oh, and the current economic situation makes one’s heart beat a little faster in desperation. But I just wondered if there was anything smart, or maybe prudent is the more precise word, in being/staying a teacher.

So I come to the wedding. Apart from the elegance of the wedding (inside at a pier on the Hudson River at the sunset of a supremely gorgeous summery day!) there was a knot of former students I hadn’t seen in a dozen years. There was Callie, the commercial attorney, and Randy, the art-creative writer teacher, and Ashby, the advertising exec, and Anna, the pathologist, and Turner, the writer-activist-actor-producer.

It was a swell time. This wonderful group of thirty-somethings was so exciting, so vibrant, so interesting! And it was very gratifying as they thanked me for the theater group and our plays we created in the mid-1990s.

It was so wonderful—because they had enjoyed a group that provided an identity, a meeting point of creativity and love and passion—much like the Denison Singers had meant to me in college and Studio Choir in high school.

Randy asked me a few interesting questions. “Now that we are adults, how did you do all you did for us when you were having adult problems of your own?” Now that he is out of adolescence, and doing the same thing as a teacher, he was interested in the hows and whys. We had a stimulating conversation about how such work invigorates you and sustains you.

Yesterday I did my last little bit of entertainment in New York. I went to a movie called, Every Little Step, a documentary made about the 2007 revival of A Chorus Line on Broadway. It was heartbreaking and exciting and inspirational about how these performers stick with something so difficult. Of course, if you are familiar with the show, you know the closing ballad explains it all, “What I Did For Love.”

In the last few days of going from the friends of my youth, to the beloved students I taught in the mid-1990s, to the prospect of returning to the AP test rigor and play preparation at KA, I get to think of what I want for them, these students in Jordan. I want them to have a group experience like we enjoyed at Latin and at Denison. I want them to think, and work hard, and to inject passion into that work. I don’t want them to be me. I want to give them a place to practice being who they must be. That is what the Denison Singers did for me.

I may say to my wonderful students this week in class: Do not do what I do. Take whatever I have to offer and do with it what I cannot imagine doing and then come back and tell me about it!