Round and Round With the Bard

Basking in the afterglow of Obama's victory and a stunning performance by Christopher Plummer in Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra the night before, my daughter Taylor and I found ourselves in Statford, Ontario on November 5 heading to the Festival Theater to catch a matinee of Romeo and Juliet. Knocking around town earlier that day we kept bumping into middle school and high school students buying souvenirs and bad food. So we weren't surprised when we got to theater and discovered that school groups comprised the lion's share of the audience. Past experience had taught me that the behavior of a school audience depends entirely on the play being performed - the kids are mesmerized by funny, plot-driven plays and are bored to tears with heavy, poetic dramas. We had nothing to worry about that day. Despite a few snickers when one of the actors dropped his trousers to change on stage and later when Romeo was all dopey over Juliet, the audience was, for the most part, rapt and well behaved.

The whole experience took me back 40 years. It was, if I'm remembering right, the fall of 1968 when my freshman English teacher took a group of us to the Stratford Festival to see Measure for Measure. I went on the trip, despite the prospect of yawning through a stuffy play, because, well, what high school kid wouldn't rather spend a day on the bus flirting with girls instead of sitting through classes? But when the fanfare played and the lights went down and the play began, I was totally sucked into a world of passion, intrigue, and language I never imagined when I was plodding though the lengthy speeches in Julius Caesar as my first exposure to Shakespeare. The play was bawdy, funny, and thought provoking. As always the acting and the staging were superb. So thanks to Ruth Friedman, my teacher, this small town, white-bread, skinny kid was ushered into a life-long love affair with theater, literature, and the Bard. I'm not sure I ever thanked her, or thanked her enough.

Over the years I've supported the Festival financially, but more importantly I've shared this experience with my first wife, my friends, my sister, my daughters, my current wife, Cary, and, in the late 1980's, with a group of kids from Highland Park Schools. After this year's experience I've decided it's time to "pay it forward" a little more and pass the experience along to another generation of school kids (if I can arrange financing with some of my business cronies and work out border issues). Maybe that, more than anything else, is a way I can finally give Mrs. Friedman the thanks she deserves.

Still basking in the the afterglow of Obama's victory and waiting anxiously for his term to begin, I find myself believing, once again, in the power of one caring person (not just the POTUS, but a teacher or a lawyer) to make a difference.