Now you grow…

It is 7:00 a.m. in Jordan and I am leaving for the airport in exactly one hour. The grades are all computed and entered. The last academic standing meetings are completed. The apartment is relatively clean. Now it is time for summer.

And now it is time to reflect on the 2009-10 school year, the third one here in Jordan.

It would be simply too clichéd to just say, “oh, it’s been a roller coaster of a year, hasn’t it?!” Each year anywhere is a roller coaster, and many of the forces have been documented in the blog (some are best left to become hazy memories or the burning embers of such ancient wrongs anyway) so instead of trying to sum up the year in a few paragraphs, I thought I would look at the year as if it were a Broadway show tune.

Hey—stop rolling your eyes, there is much wisdom in the philosophy/lyrics of an Ira Gershwin or an Irving Berlin or a Yip Harburg or an Oscar Hammerstein! But instead of looking at the year as if it were the climax of Carousel and we all warbled “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” I am choosing to investigate the oeuvre of Stephen Sondheim for my summation of the year.

In the mid-1990s New York magazine or The New Yorker (can’t remember which) posed a question in a cover story, “Is Stephen Sondheim God?” Oh my. Well, Sondheim has had an incredibly fertile 50-year+ career and is often thought to be the last of the great Broadway songwriters. This spring Sondheim turned 80, and there have been a bevy of tributes and shows in honor of his musical genius. As an adopted New Yorker, I came to see that most in the theater world think of him as the grand master of the Manhattan sensibility—a certain urbane, sophisticated, neurotic, hyper-articulate and disenchanted humanist. I didn’t have to look too hard to think of a comparison to our school year in his shows. I turned to Merrily We Roll Along, one of the shows that has gotten away from me so far in my directing career. I have wanted to do The Miracle Worker and Merrily We Roll Along for almost 20 years, and somehow have not gotten that opportunity to direct them yet.

Anyway, Merrily We Roll Along is a show about youth and about middle age. The show is structured to go backwards, beginning with a certain disenchantment one can find in middle age, working backward, seeking when it all went wrong, and ending in that glorious ebullience and promise of youth. One of the reasons I have wanted to direct this show is that in the end, it is the 18 year old set that has the right attitude, and the mid-40 somethings should recapture the tremors of learning and growing and not just wallow in bitterness. The show was not a success at all on Broadway—I think it ran a total of 9 performances. One of the problems is casting—do you cast the parts with 20 year olds? Do you cast the parts with 40 year olds? Since I direct high school theater, the answer is simple and the pitfall over the perfect age a moot point for me.

Anyway, as I look back at the year, there have certainly been problems, frustrations, challenges, and moments of wondering what in the world…In Merrily We Roll Along Sondheim offers us a taunting tune called “Now Your Know,” which encapsulates a tart and skeptical worldview:

“I mean, big surprise:
people love you and tell you lies;
bricks can fall out of clear blue skies.
It’s called flowers wilt,
it’s called apples rot,
it’s called thieves get rich and saints get shot.
Now you know.”

Wow. Even God makes a fleeting appearance, only to be dismissed as a disappointment who “doesn’t answer prayers a lot.”

From this tough cookie, chipper, zesty song, the only solution is to grit your teeth and soldier on:

“It’s called count to 10,
It’s called burn your bridges, start again.”

The only palliative to the bitterness of experience is a therapeutic imperative:
“Now you grow.”

There are harsh truths about life, and we often don’t like seeing them in schools, certainly not in schools whose hyperbole is that we are creating the future leaders of tomorrow. But those harsh truths, of course, are not the only things to see and understand.

As I look back on this year, not to gloss over the many moments when an embittered guardian angel might have tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Hey, now you know!” but it is more than the collection of those harsh truths. Yes, cynicism and disillusion come mighty easily in a new venture (or an old venture as well) but as our headmaster showed us all the time, we must not waver from the mission of starting something new and daring in a place where a school like this has not existed. As Julianne, my sensible, no-nonsense, the-mission-statement-is-my-middle-name friend and colleague told the board of trustees recently, “Look, we get up every morning. We meet the new day and we try and make it work. It’s working.”

As Merrily We Roll Along careens backward in time, to those moments of naivete about some of the harsh truths, our young and exciting protagonists celebrate the most important thing they have—their friendship. Its most eloquent expression is found in another song from Merrily called, “Old Friends”:

“Time goes by
Everything else keeps changing.

You and I

We get continued next week."

The bittersweet acknowledgement that friendship gets us through the rough patches culminates with a toast:

"Here’s to us!
Who’s like us?
Damn few!”


That’s it! As Sondheim’s songs in Merrily We Roll Along explore the aches and the complicated harsh truths about life and relationships, there is the unalloyed answer to survival: leaning on and celebrating old friends.

In a few minutes I will close the drapes, check the locks, and close the door on the apartment in Jordan, and effectively close the door on the 2009-10 school year. But the harsh edges of the year are quietly softening now as I think about the friends here at KA who make life meaningful and rich. As I said the other day in a blogisode, I worked with a quintet of people in the Office of Student Life who amazed and humbled and completed me. This team was a source of laughter and inspiration for hard work and intimacy without fear. When Eric asked me nearly two years ago if I knew anyone who had the stomach for this kind of hard work, I answered quickly—Julianne. And she has led the office with determination and a desire to know and grow. And I worked with my History and Social Studies Department—10 of us who fit so well despite age and background differences. I couldn’t wait to see them each day and learn from them and love being around them. These are the groups I wish to toast and thank—we continued every day trying to make the mission statement a reality at the school. We get continued next year.

And I head home on the plane excited for all the old friends I will see and visit this summer worthy of a toast.

Stephen Sondheim offered us choices in Merrily We Roll Along—we could succumb to, and wallow in, a bitterness that is not unfathomable or untrue or unreal. Indeed, there is only new and different in the largely unimaginable future. That can frighten us. But as the sage Steve said simply, like it or not, and however we do it, now we grow.