On Thanksgiving Day, NBC aired the Macy's Parade, as they always do. In keeping with tradition, they began the broadcast with an hour or so of interviews with NBC celebrities, as well as a few performances from Broadway musicals. Matilda was represented, as was the Tony winner for best revival, Pippin, and the Tony winner for best new musical, Kinky Boots. If you're unfamiliar with the show, Kinky Boots is a musical based on a film (most of them are these days) that features music by Cyndi Lauper and a pretty large number of fabulous drag queens.

I have not seen the show, but I'm familiar enough with it that I was unsurprised to see the performance. After all, it was the Tony winner for best new musical. That's a big deal. And of course I had heard of the film upon its release a few years ago, although I didn't see it. Cinemas in South Georgia tend to steer clear of independent films about drag queens. And this leads me to my point: apparently there were quite a few folks who were plenty surprised and upset about the performance at the parade. According to The Huffington Post, many self-described conservatives took to Twitter to voice their displeasure.

I suppose it makes me naive that I did not expect such a reaction. Drag queens are just, for lack of a better word, normal to me. Queens just are. In the world my family & I inhabit, some people wear the clothing traditional to their gender and some do not, and that's the end of it. I'm sure the majority of Broadway folks feel the same way. They didn't think twice about putting drag queens on television at 9:00am because they do not see anything wrong with drag queens. But there is an entire subculture in the US that is still shocked by drag queens. Thursday morning was one more example of the divisions we see in this country. And, again I really don't believe the producers of the show expected a negative reaction. After all, the song they performed was about acceptance of other people, no matter who they are.

And so this got me thinking about Duck Dynasty. Ok, stay with me.

As I understand it, Duck Dynasty is a TV show about a family of duck hunters. I believe they have their own line of duck hunting products, but I'm not certain about this. Anyway, I have heard of the show but I've never seen any of it. As ubiquitous as it is here in the South, I know very little about it. (The fact that I know more about a Broadway play featuring drag queens than about this national weekly television show should give you an idea of where I'm headed here.)

A few weeks ago my son's Cub Scout pack started planning for this year's Cub Family Weekend. The annual event is a gathering of scout packs from all over this area of the state. Over 1,000 boys & their families camp out together & do various outdoorsy activities. And every year there is a theme. It wasn't drag queens. The adults & most of the boys in the group were thrilled that the weekend would be Duck Dynasty themed. Many of them said things like "this is the best theme ever!" and "they couldn't have come up with a better theme if they had tried!" Our city's pack got really into the Duck Dynasty-ness of it all and went all out, even winning the contest for a campsite decorated to best reflect the theme. This was just fine, of course, and I'm very happy they won & very happy they enjoyed themselves. But this theme meant absolutely nothing to me. The catch phrases, the inside jokes, even the names of the characters were all lost on me. I had no context.

So this brings us back around to NBC. The producers did not consider folks who had no context for Kinky Boots any more than the leadership of the Alapaha Council considered people like me who had no context for Duck Dynasty. This is a Tony winning musical so everyone should know it, right? This is an internationally famous TV show so everyone will be familiar with it, right? These decision makers were deep enough in their own contexts that it didn't occur to them that other people might not be there with them.

I would suggest that this sort of 21st century isolationism is a result, paradoxically, of the abundance of information and opinions available to us at every turn. The Internet, television, and, by extension, the world, are now places where people can find anything they want. The problem is that that's ALL we find: what we want to find. If we want to find drag queens, we can. Grizzled hunters? No problem. But if we don't want to see those things, we can avoid them just as easily. And politics are even worse. One could easily wrap oneself in a conservative or liberal cocoon of information and convince oneself that anyone outside that cocoon is misguided or even evil. It's not just easy to do; it is encouraged.

I believe we have so divorced ourselves from others' contexts that we have begun to see people outside of our narrow places of existence as somehow less than human. This phenomenon is not new, of course. Humans have always been suspect of the "other." For thousands of years, though, this isolationism has been largely driven by geography, race, or theology rather than ideological differences. What we now see is that we can be isolated from others even as we walk beside them. We can, through picking and choosing what we read or listen to, completely convince ourselves that everyone in the world is just like us.

I know I have struggled with such isolation myself, so I've been thinking about this quite a bit. What can I do to "be the change" as the saying goes? As Advent is the beginning of the church year for liturgical types, it seems as good a time as any for me to try & turn over a new leaf. Why wait another month when the time for change could just as easily be now? So my goal for myself is to tune in to others a little more as we enter the season of Advent and continue into 2014. I challenge you to join me. Listen to a type of music you'd normally turn away from. Listen to people you might assume are completely different from you. I'll be doing the same. I challenge myself this month to look at the world with more compassion, and to remember the human beings behind the rhetoric. I need to improve as much as anyone, if not more. I hope to be able to see things in a different way.

As I've posted before, I tend to judge people I expect will be judgmental of me (or my friends) before I even get to know them. This is devastatingly bad logic. December will be my month to listen before I react and to fully consider what I'm hearing. I hope I'll be able to do so. It will help me to grow if I let it.

I only realized just today that I haven't posted anything here in about six weeks. It has been a considerably busy month and a half. But even so, I realize that we always have time to the things we make time to do, so I must admit I've been neglecting my writing. That also means I've been neglecting myself and skewing my priorities, as writing is one of the things that keeps me (relatively) balanced. So I should get back into it. I do have 4 or 5 drafts of blog posts that I need to complete, I just haven't dedicated the time to do so. Perhaps now I can.

As most of you know, my life for the past few weeks has been about mounting the fall show at the high school where I work, as well as putting together several theatre festivals for high school kids. I have been thrilled with the results & success of the show, and many students have benefitted from the work I and many others put in to make the festivals successful. It's good to have those things behind me, wonderful as they were. And now I'm moving on to another potentially great yet rather demanding event: the Christmas play for this year, which is our largest show of the season. So I guess I'm saying I know I'll be plenty busy for a few more weeks, but I fully intend to write more on order to keep myself sane. Well, closer to it, at least.

Theatre is a great love of mine, but I feel I've been neglecting my own health in the pursuit of art. I've been neglecting my family time too, and that's something I really need to get a handle on. I will continue to make art, of course, but I need to find a way to balance things. I suppose that is the story of most of us. I hope I can find time for more variety in my life. Maybe I'll even read a book.

I've always been fascinated with the idea of alternate realities in fiction. Before I continue, I feel the need to pass along two quick disclaimers/words of warning about this post: 1) I wrote this one for a bit of fun; it is less philosophical than usual and falls somewhere between fanboy pontificating and narcissistic navel gazing. 2) This post contains multiple spoilers for 10- and 20- year old television shows.

Whether they're alternate worlds, alternate timelines, or even parallel dimensions, the idea of a reality "almost like our own but not quite" has always been intriguing to me. For whatever reason, my favorite episodes of most shows and comics ask the question "what if it had been this way?" or "how might things have been different?" and explore those possibilities. (Note: LOST is the exception here, as I was never really sold on the sideways universe.) I've been kicking this around, asking myself what it might mean for me, psychologically speaking, that I fixate on these sorts of questions. But first, a few examples:

1) Buffy imagined her whole life ["Normal Again" Buffy the Vampire Slayer S6E17].

In this season 6 episode penned by Diego Gutierrez (Without a Trace; Warehouse 13), Buffy is attacked by a demon whose venom makes her believe she's not the slayer at all, but is actually a patient in an asylum in Los Angeles. Sunnydale is Her fantasy, her only escape. The genius of this episode is that the alternate universe is much more plausible than the "real world" inhabited by Slayer Buffy & the Scoobies. The Buffy of this world went mad & burned down her high school gym (with no vampires inside this time) and then slid into a fantasy world. In her fantasy, she is a super-powered savior of the world and is the protagonist in an ongoing battle between good and evil.

That description sounds like the inside of *most* teenagers' heads; that's what makes the episode work so well. In the end, we are left doubting ourselves. Is Sunnydale the real world? It is certainly less likely than the asylum in LA. The episode leaves us with a choice similar to Buffy's: do we choose to continue to watch a show that may all be taking place inside the mind of a crazy person?

2. Tasha Yar has a meaningful death ["Yesterday's Enterprise" Star Trek: The Next Generation S3E15]. Tasha Yar's frustratingly meaningless death late in season 1 was tempered somewhat by her resurrection and subsequent far-more-significant sacrifice when the Enterprise C slips through time and creates an alternate reality. Tasha reappears on the bridge as the lost ship from 25 years ago passes through a rift in time and alters the timeline of the Enterprise D. Only Guinan seems to realize that anything is amiss. The most significant change in the history is that the Federation is embroiled in a galaxy-wide war with the Klingons. At Guinan's insistence, Tasha returns to the past with the crew of the Enterprise C in order to reset the timeline.

Perhaps one of the things I love about the alternate reality or alternate timeline plot device is that it allows for do-overs. Tasha Yar's death in "Skin of Evil" (S1E22) was unforgivably bad. She was a major crew member who had, among other things, had sex with an android, but she went out like a redshirt! Yes, I understand that Denise Crosby wanted out of her contract and the writers obliged, but it seemed so senseless. "Yesterday's Enterprise" gave viewers the death they felt Tasha deserved.

Another great thing about this episode is its use of the Guinan character to bridge the two timelines. Throughout the series we are occasionally reminded that Guinan is much more than a slinger of synthanol. Guinan is an El-Aurian, a race of long-lived "listeners" which is now spread across the galaxy, but it is implied that Guinan is somehow special even among her own people. Her presence in this episode is important, as she is the catalyst for setting things right again. We get glimpses of her wisdom and strength and we learn that for some reason Picard trusts her above anyone else, even when what she says seems to make no sense.

3. Evil Captain Archer steals future Kirk's ship and attempts to become the emperor of space (yes, really, and yes, I freaking love this episode) ["In a Mirror, Darkly" Star Trek: Enterprise S4E18-19].

This two-parter is widely thought to be one of the best episodes of the prequel series Star Trek: Enterprise, despite having such an outrageous premise. The "Mirror Universe" has been a staple of Star Trek since the original series, and plays a major part in the events of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. This is the universe that gave us the "goatees are evil" trope, a la Mr. Spock. Enterprise mines this familiar territory for some great results.

One of the great things about Star Trek's mirror universe is that it lets us get a glimpse into who these characters might have been if things had gone another way. It is important to point out that characters in that universe aren't always direct mirror images of their selves in the prime universe. They are simply other versions of themselves, having been influenced by different sets of circumstances. To go to Buffy again, consider the It's-a-Wonderful-Life-ish episode in which Buffy wishes she weren't the slayer. People are different, but there is still a grain of the same person inside.

I could go on & on (Supernatural, anyone?), but these 3 examples are probably sufficient to make my point. Notice that two of them are from Star Trek. I find that some of the most compelling Star Trek episodes fall into this category. In fact, the new film franchise itself is set in an alternate timeline. Whole series are even based on this concept. Sliders and Fringe come to mind immediately.

So what is it about these episodes, films, and shows that fascinates me so? Let's dispense with the obvious here and go ahead and acknowledge that I do love the goatees & eyepatches generally worn by the "evil" versions of our heroes, not the mention the almost always skimpy attire of the evil versions of female characters. (What's up with that, by the way? In my experience, evil women have been less likely to favor midriff shirts and log hair than, say, polyester pantsuits and updos.) At any rate, production folks seem to allow themselves the freedom to make bolder choices when their characters cross into other dimensions. This may be the key to it.

I have always been one to ask questions, to wonder. That's pretty typical of artists, particularly those so interested in stories as I am. I wonder what the alternate realities of my own life would be. l wonder how things would have been had I "turned left" as Donna did in the Doctor Who episode that deals with this concept. That's not to say I'm unhappy, of course. But I'm curious about something that is completely impossible to ever answer. So that's probably what this is about. I see myself reflected in the characters I become so connected to in the shows I watch, so in some ways their journeys to alternate realities somehow satisfy my own need to do the same. Maybe that's why the writers who develop these episodes do so themselves. We have a need to consider possibilities.

It's also a damn good excuse to show T'Pol holding a rifle above her bare navel, and who's gonna argue with that?

When I was a child I would sometimes have peculiar hallucinations. They weren't visual (well, not exactly; more on that later) but rather tactile hallucinations. I had no name for them, so I simply labeled them my "funny feelings" so I could alert those I loved when I felt them coming on. These hallucinations happened most acutely at night, though sometimes I would still feel the after effects well into the following day, sometimes for days on end. Although they aren't as strong anymore, I still get them every now and then. Some nights they're still bad enough to keep me awake, but that's rarer these days. Until now, I have never spoken of these episodes to anyone except my parents (when I was a child) and my wife.

Unfortunately, my son began to feel the same things just this past Labor Day weekend. If you've been keeping score, you know that's yet another in a series of downers for our family in the past few weeks. And although I know I'm in no way responsible for him having the same condition as me, I still feel parental guilt. I had it. I passed it on to him. So, as any good & paranoid 21st century American would, I turned to the Internet to try to find some answers. I found that we are not alone. I choose to speak up now because I hope others will read this and realize the same is true for them.

Although the World Wide Web is far from qualified to make a diagnosis, and although the condition is not yet listed on WebMD (this one I have mixed feelings about), it still felt like a breakthrough to know that other people have this same condition, and to learn that IT HAS A NAME! (thanks, Annie Sullivan) The almighty web informs me that the condition is called "Alice in Wonderland Syndrome" (AIWS). The name comes from Alice's feelings of growing and shrinking, and from everything seeming to be the wrong size. Some literary types speculate that Lewis Carol himself may have suffered from this very condition, so accurate are his descriptions of the sensations.

I am fairly certain that AIWS is what we are experiencing, as it is often associated with migraine conditions, which my son and I both have, and onset often occurs at just at the point of sleep (which is consistent with our experience as well). These characteristics plus the symptoms themselves would indicate that I'm onto something here and not just pulling a diagnosis out the air. And since I've been tiptoeing around those symptoms and being somewhat vague up till now, I'll take a moment to attempt to describe exactly what AIWS is and how it makes us feel.

The first word that comes to mind is "Wrong." "Terror" is the second.

When I say it just feels wrong, I mean it feels like my hands, and sometimes my whole body, are the wrong size. In my case, weight and mass seem to always contradict one another, or to go in opposite directions. If my hands feel small, they also feel HEAVY. If they feel large, they feel light. As simple as this might seem in this description, I assure you that it is quite terrifying in reality.

The primary cause for terror, most likely, is the lack of control. This is not something I can turn off, and it almost always keeps me awake whenever it occurs, so there is no escape from it. I also often experience waking dreams (or I guess one could call them visual hallucinations) which add to the overall horror of the experience. I have spent many sleepless nights in what I can only describe as psychological torment, torn between sleeping and waking, each seeming scarier than the other.

AIWS (if that's what it is) has been a part of my life for many years, and now it is becoming a part of my son's life as well. I am only now discovering that I'm not alone. If you or someone you love has had similar experiences, please share them in the comments. If we have to face the terrors of Wonderland, it is at least some comfort to know that we need not face them alone.

As odd a choice as he might seem, I have long considered Bilbo Baggins a personal patron saint of sorts. As a pre-teen I devoured The Hobbit but lost interest in The Lord of the Rings as soon as Bilbo vanished at the birthday party and I realized Frodo would be the focus of these later books. I have since returned to The Lord of the Rings trilogy and have learned to love Frodo, Sam, and the others, but Bilbo was always the one who held a special connection for me.


Bilbo is a man of contradictions. Perhaps this is what draws me to him. Bilbo is both homebody and adventurer, one wrapped inside the other so tightly as to be inseparable from it. Although he is reluctant to step out onto the road at first, he comes to embrace the life of a traveler; however, while he is on the road, his heart is always of the hearth. As an extension of this duality, when we see him later in life, he has been at home long enough to have developed a craving for the road. He is happy both in the now and in the to-be.


Contrast Bilbo's Janus-like affinities for opposite states with Frodo's tendency to forever crave the comforts of the Shire. Frodo undertakes his adventures out of a sense of duty. He carries the ring as a burden, and is always anchored in the green, peaceful northwestern corner of Middle Earth. Granted, Frodo's mission is considerably more dire and dangerous than Bilbo's, but even so, Bilbo seems to take a certain glee in defeating trolls and hiding from dragons, while Frodo seeks only to return to the Shire and stay there for the rest of his life. One could argue that Frodo only agrees to leave for the Grey Havens because of a sense of familial obligation to Bilbo, who desires one last adenture at the end of his unnaturally long life.


As I grow older, I still find myself relating to Bilbo. In some ways, I relate to him even more now than ever. I too am both adventurer and homebody, though of course not to the extremes of my fictional halfling mentor. Over the past few years, I have learned to embrace these disparate aspects of myself. The trick is in striking a balance. Too long at home and I start to go stir crazy. I start quoting good old Bilbo to my wife: "I want to see mountains again! Mountains, Gandalf!" Her eyerolls are almost audible. But on the other hand, if I'm too long away, homesickness sets in. I find myself drawing pictures of swamps and daydreaming about the sweet songs of rainfrogs.


I think this applies to a lot of areas of my life. I love being busy, but while I'm busy I crave down time. I love long breaks, but I feel lost when I'm not doing a show. So I work to balance it. I try to make sure I'm feeding all of those areas of my life. I find I'm happiest when I don't got too far in one direction or the other. Hunting dragons is great, but the Shire is beautiful in the springtime.


As of now, I'm in the busiest time of my year, and I haven't been in the wilderness in almost two months. So I'm seeking balance. I'll plan a trip soon and draw some mountain air into my lungs. I'll seek adventure. And on every mountaintop I'll dream of cypress trees.

I am currently working on a production of The Tectonic Theatre Project's nonfictional theatre piece "The Laramie Project" about the 1998 slaying of gay college student Matthew Sheppard. One of the quotes that really stands out to me comes from a billboard that was prominently displayed along the highway leading into the small Western town shortly after the incident: "Hate is not a Laramie value."

Throughout the play, characters struggle with this idea. Is this us? Is this not us? What is the distinction between a collective culture and a few violent outliers?

In the rural area of the Southeastern United States where my wife and I grew up and still live, we face a similar conundrum. We can never get too far into a discussion of Southern culture without bumping up against bigotry. We have been having some serious conversations about such things in our house of late, and I have heard folks outside our household make statements about this that made me feel it is an important conversation to have. This morning in church, one of the parishioners said "I love being a Southerner but I don't love the attitudes of a lot of the people around here," so I figured it was time to get this post out into the open. Credit for many of the ideas below goes to Christia Williams, who first brought this idea to my attention.

The American South (and by that I mean the Southeast: the Old Confederacy) has rich traditions and wonderful legacies. The sad thing is that many of these legacies are tainted, at least in the eyes of many outsiders, by a history of racism, sexism, class division, and other forms of bigotry. But there are many of us who identify as rural Southerners who do not embrace the hatred and entitlement of our ancestors.

As an example of how we're viewed, recently someone said to me, "I moved here from California, and I can tell you that Georgia is ten years behind everywhere else!" I simply don't think that's true. At the very least, I'd say it isn't *entirely* true. Sure, there is a vociferous segment of "god, guns, & gays" Southerners who loudly defend their own freedoms while gladly limiting the freedoms of others, but I simply cannot believe those folks are in the majority. They're certainly not the majority in our circle of friends.

So if bigotry doesn't tell the whole story, what does define us? What is rural Southern culture? Is this worth holding onto?

Over the past few years, my wife and I have lost several family members. Often they have been older people who taught us a lot about life. We see the traditions of our elders threatening to fade away just as they have, so we have decided to do as much as we can to preserve them. We look to the rural, agricultural past. We plant a garden. We raise a few chickens. We are cooking almost exclusively in family cast iron these days, and my wife crochets gifts for family members. Most recently, she has learned to make traditional 12-layer chocolate cakes (that's one of hers in the picture) and I've been teaching our son some old gospel songs from my Pentecostal days. We have both discovered that we love banjo music.

These are the things that make us who we are, and they are worthy of being embraced. Southern culture isn't a red & blue flag of exclusion. Southern culture is open-door hospitality & losing your voice at a ball game. It is deep-fried everything & slow fiddling that brings tears to the eyes. Being Southern and rural means being kept awake on summer nights by rain frogs you'd swear have microphones. It means snowy cotton fields and long stories and cakes stacked perilously high that nonetheless yield to a fork as gently as the soft butter on their ingredients list.

We can still be Southern. We can maintain our identities. We can loudly love Jesus without looking down on those who follow other paths. We need not hate people because of race or appearance or sexual orientation or political affiliation (or anything else, for that matter). It is possible for us to embrace our lives as Southerners without forsaking our lives as loving, tolerant people who reserve judgment of others.

I am proud of my rural Southern heritage. I love the black, swampy earth of North Florida and South Georgia. I love a Southern accent when it's wrapped around a large vocabulary and an inclination for colorful imagery. I love being a Southerner, and I hope to see the attitudes in this area continue to progress. I pray that they will.

This past weekend, my son and I were in a car accident that could very well have ended a whole lot worse than it did. We were on the interstate during a rainstorm and we hit a puddle which sent us spinning into a concrete wall. We are both doing just fine, and there were no injuries, though I'm now in the market for a new vehicle.

In addition to the accident, the last couple of weeks have seen a cold (or several) make its way from me to my wife to my son. Our house has been a germ fest and we've been lucky to have gotten anything done. My son has also begun to experience a migraine-related malady I have suffered since my youth, which I won't go into here, as it probably deserves an entry all to itself.

Just before that all started, my mother underwent surgery from what we now know was stage 3 breast cancer. The surgery was a success and she is doing well now, but she's still waiting to find out what sort of treatments she'll be receiving. She has been handling it very well, but we are understandably concerned and have spent sleepless hours in prayer and worry about her condition.

These bumps in the road, major and minor, have occurred just before my 39th birthday, so I've been (perhaps unsurprisingly) having a bit of an existential crisis this Labor Day. All I seem to be able to think about are the paths I didn't take and the mistakes I've made and how wasted I believe my life would have been if it had ended on that stretch of I-75 last Friday. A part of me is screaming inside, urging me to run. To sell my possessions, buy a jeep, fill it with camping gear, and go hide in the wilderness.

I find myself obsessively digging up strangely arbitrary age comparisons to prove to myself that I am getting old and am, therefore quickly running out of time. For example, I discovered that the date of my birth is closer to the release dates of the film versions of Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz than it is to today's date. Scarlett and Dorothy are taunting me from their respective graves, their eternally 16-year-old technicolor faces raising perfect eyebrows at the sight of the gray in my beard and the receding hairline revealing more and more of my age-spotted forehead. I ask myself "what does it all mean!?" as if I'm a character in a Beckett play.

Fortunately, today I ran across Taylor Mail's excellent poem "What Teachers Make," which you can view here if you're among the uninitiated: http://youtu.be/RGKm201n-U4 . I've been a fan of the piece for a good long time so I wasn't surprised by the content. I was, however, surprised that I seem to have lost sight of it.

The worth of my life isn't in how many trips I've taken or whether I've won every theatre contest or actually kept the weight off this time (spoiler alert: I haven't) but rather in the seeds I plant in others. I do make a difference. This is not a delusion of self-importance, this is simply a true fact. I have had students tell me they wouldn't have finished school if it hadn't been for me, or that they would probably have taken their own lives if I hadn't taken the time to sit and listen to them. In fact, just an hour before the accident, I had been sitting with a student well past my required hours to help the young person handle a problem. That person's life will be a better one because of the action I took that day. If that had been my last official act as a living human being, it would have been a noble one.

Goals and accomplishments are valuable, yes. But the true worth of our lives lies in the connections we make with others. Jesus referred to this as "laying up treasures in Heaven" (Matt. 6:20, KJV). I do not believe he was talking about a chronologically distant karmic payday, in which we will have literal jewels in literal crowns which are the rewards of our good deeds. Treasures in heaven are the kindnesses we do to one another when we don't have to.

Most of the teachers I know have this quality of generosity, and they have it in spades. They give of themselves because they want the world to be a better place, not because of their salaries or benefits. I have changed lives because of who I am and where I am. I have changed lives because of what I do and the passion with which I do it.

I will turn 39 on Wednesday. I will not look at that day as the end of my 30s nor as a continuing march to the grave. I will not think of what might have been or the turns I could have made. I will think of it as a new beginning. I will think of 39 as the year I continue to make a difference. I will make good art. I will move people to laughter and to tears, and I will take action to make the world a better place. I will live into joy this year, and I will live life like I mean it. After all, tomorrow is another day.

As school begins again, I find myself reflecting on what I do as a theatre teacher. I am gearing up to start the new semester, and with it the new theatre season. I will pour hours and hours into the theatre program after school and on the weekends. There are teachers just like me all over the country, about to engage in the madness of managing a high school theatre program. Most folks are probably unaware of this subculture, but I think my theatre teaching friends will relate to these observations and confessions. If you're unfamiliar with the life of the theatre teacher, some of these might surprise you.

1) I love what I do. I really, truly love it. If I didn't, I would not do it.

2) I went to school for this. I am a trained theatre artist with a degree in the performing arts. I know what to look for when choosing a play or casting a show. I dedicated years of my life to learning how to do this stuff. That's not to say parents or other folks shouldn't question any of my decisions; I will certainly have a misstep every now and then. But I was hired as the theatre teacher because I am highly qualified to do this job. I have spent many years learning about the arts, practicing theatre, and reading or seeing as many plays as I can. Theatre may not be one of the "3 Rs" but it takes time and effort to learn how to so this. If you do wish to suggest a way that I can do something better, please keep this in mind and approach me with respect.

3) Theatre productions cost money. This may seem obvious, but you would not believe how many people ask to get into the show for free or complain about ticket prices. We get donations from our school and our community in order to keep prices low so people can see our performances, and NO ONE gets paid from those ticket sales. Each show's box office supports the next show. That's about it.

4) I have heard that "drama drama" joke a million times. It was not funny to begin with. Threatening to send me the girls who "start drama" or saying "I bet there's DRAMA in drama CLUB!" does not amuse me.

5) Casting is one of the most difficult parts of my job. I cast shows based on my years of experience studying theatre (see # 2), reading plays, watching plays, teaching students, and operating a company of student actors and technicians. I do not have the show cast before I see the auditions. I do not cast kids because they are my pets or because I know their parents socially. I want the play to be the very best show it can be, so I place kids in their roles based on what I see in the audition room. I have never used casting as a method of reward or punishment. Above all, I will do my very best to be fair and to put together a show we can all take pride in.

6) No. We will not do WICKED.

7) Yes, I am tough. I challenge my students because I want them to learn and grow through theatre classes and plays. I have high expectations and I ask a lot of my pupils. When they push themselves to meet those standards, they will become better artists and, hopefully, better people. They will be glad they did.

8) I will make mistakes. Again, this may seem like a no-brainer, but I have often found myself being held to an impossible standard of perfection by students, parents, or administrators. I do not claim to know it all, nor will I get it right every time. I will ask a lot of myself, just as I will as a lot of my students. I will often succeed, but sometimes I will fail. Art is about risk. And speaking of art...

9) Perhaps the most challenging aspect of teaching theatre in a public school is that of balancing my dual roles of educator and artist. The educator is expected to proliferate the status quo. The artist is expected to push boundaries. The arts educator is therefore trapped somewhere between those extremes. In order to strike that balance, I will be sure to choose at least one or two mainstream, well-known family shows each season. But I will also include plays that are new or obscure or challenging or even all three at once. Students need both types of shows in order to grow as artists.

10) Directing plays is only a small part of what I do. Granted, it is the most visible part. I also teach classes in theatre and (as most of my peers do as well) English language arts. This means while I do spend a ton of time working on whatever play we're doing, I am also writing lesson plans, attending meetings, grading essays, and preparing kids for standardized tests. And this only scrapes the surface. Oh, and I'm also married and I have a child. If I forget something or accidentally give you the wrong information, please understand that I am being pulled in many different directions. I will set it right as soon as I have a chance.

Do you have other confessions? Relate to these? Add your feelings in the comments!

[Part two in a series of reflections on my experiences on a brief solo section hike on the Appalachian trail.]

I am a backwoods person, to be sure. That is to say, I was raised in a decidedly off-the-beaten-path rural community in North Florida. We were a good fifteen minute drive from the nearest grocery store and a solid hour from things like shopping malls and multiplexes. Our property was surrounded by trees and was only accessible via a dirt road.

I spent a lot of time in the woods. We explored, camped, fished, hunted, and rode our ATVs in the green, swampy North Florida forests. My uncle was superintendent of the local state park, so we spent plenty of time there as well.

When I moved the 120 miles or so away from my hometown to South Georgia, the landscape stayed roughly the same. I still live on a wooded lot down a dirt road in a very small town that boasts a state park and a lake. I still spend a lot of my leisure time in the woods camping, hiking, or just picnicking with my family. We like to go to state and national parks. We very much enjoy the outdoors.

Camping at campsites and along the riverbank is all well and good, but wilderness hiking is a different animal entirely. My recent hike on the AT was not my first solo jaunt into the wild, but it is my longest so far, and proved to be both the most challenging and most rewarding experience I have yet had in the backcountry.

Perhaps what strikes me the most about backcountry distance hiking is that things mean so much more out there. The things we take for granted here in civilization can mean one's very survival once electrical outlets and flush toilets are left behind. My first full realization of the truth of this came on my first day, when I had been walking for several hours & was starting to get a little low on drinking water. I wasn't completely out of the wet stuff yet, but I knew if I didn't refill soon, I'd start to run into a problem when it came time to make camp. I arrived at a short little side trail that led to a fresh, cold mountain spring. The sign marking the trail read:

WATER

High Quality H2O

BLESS IT!

The enthusiasm of the signmaker did not seem out of place at all at the time. Water, which I so take for granted in my everyday life, had become something meaningful and important. When I could no longer take a few steps to the kitchen and fill my glass, I was forced to pay attention to water. I attended carefully. I found the crack in the stone where the spring erupted and I filled my plastic waterskin, carefully affixing the filter attachment before indulging in the cleanest, coolest, most delicious water I had ever tasted.

I learned, also, that good shoes and fastidious foot care can make or break a hike. In my case, even with both, my feet developed problems after a while. But without them, I wouldn't have made it past the first day. In my closet at home I have about a dozen pairs of shoes. If I damage a pair or if I find that it no longer fits quite right, I simply buy a new pair. Until I began hiking a few years ago, I did not understand how important something as seemingly routine as a good pair of shoes could be in the right situation.

There were other elements that were essential to my journey, of course. There was the food I had packed and the length of rope that was needed to suspend it above the ground at night so as not to attract bears to my campsite. There was my tent. My maps. My sleeping bag. My walking sticks, which my time as a hiker has taught me are far more important than most people give them credit for. These were all necessary. But for me, it all boiled down to fresh water and comfortable shoes.

Both in the woods and since my return, I have often found myself thinking of Henry David Thoreau's famous passage in Walden:

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.”

As a teacher of American literature, I have read, spoken, heard, and taught these words for a decade and a half. I understood them, to some extent. I knew the meaning of the words and I knew what Thoreau was getting at. I had an intellectual grasp of the concepts. But it was not until I had gone out on my own and backed life into a corner with sweat running down my face and thigh muscles that would have been screaming had only they had voices that I truly understood how right Thoreau had gotten it.

The phrase "the essential facts of life" has much more meaning for me now, as I am beginning to understand in my very soul what Thoreau meant by life in "its lowest terms." Life in its lowest terms is a cold, clear spring after miles of climbing mountains. When Thoreau speaks of "what was not life," he's talking about my iPhone.

When we take away those things which bear only the illusion of necessity and not the thing itself, we take the first steps on the path toward a new life. Wisdom traditions both old and new tell us this. Thoreau's "cut a broad swath and shave close" is Jesus of Nazareth's "sell all your belongings" which is, in turn, Tyler Durden's "the things you own end up owning you."

Am I there yet? Indeed, I am not. I will continue to use my air conditioning and my computer. I will still care far too much about how many times a brown oblong ball crosses a white stripe on Sunday afternoons. But I will be taking John Muir's advice, as often as I am able:

Keep close to Nature's heart... and break clear away, once in awhile, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.

This week the laurel oaks on the back half of our property announced the approach of autumn in blazing reds and yellows.

Although we technically have another six weeks left of summer, fellow teachers and parents will understand that for me fall is already beginning. I have started the process of lesson planning and classroom preparation, and quite a few of my colleagues in other systems have already seen students return for the new semester.

Each year as summer winds down, I find myself feeling nostalgic. The slant of light shifts, the leaves begin to turn, school starts to gear up again, and my thoughts begin to drift back to childhood. I'm certain things didn't feel so wonderfully perfect then as I now remember, but memory is funny that way.

When my grandmother passed away in January, I wrote a poem for her funeral that captures how I've been feeling & some of the things I've been thinking about over the last few days. She has been gone for seven months now, but each time a season changes I find myself thinking about her and missing her all over again. I decided to share the entire poem here rather than try to put those feelings into new words.

Not Quite an Elegy

Summers at my Granny's meant
   hot days and scuppernongs & figs & hard little peaches
   that defied the muddy soil in her back yard, pushing
   out into the world to bring us juicy sweetness.
   Those days meant relatives & numerous stray cats --
   she could never say no to feeding either.

Life at her house on those long, sunny days
   was about scratchy yellow carpet,
   clear plastic mats defending the high traffic areas from wear.
   It meant playing hide & seek in the many rooms
   that had been added to the once-tiny house
   sitting just below the main road.
   It was watching her open a fresh can of evaporated milk
   to sweeten her coffee
   Then seeing that same can last a week in the
   heavy old refrigerator in the corner of the kitchen

Autumn meant we saw her less during the days
   Although many afternoons were spent sitting
   on her floor with our old rerunning friends
   George Jefferson & The Fonz
   (though try as I might, I could never activate Granny's
   aging record player with a snap of my fingers)

That time of the year meant visiting on Sundays
   gathering to eat the butter beans
   she had shelled on Saturday,
   her short thumbs shaped perfectly for splitting the hulls.
   Those Sunday meals meant family.
   And on Sundays near a birthday, the special
   man or woman or boy or girl of the week
   was honored by my Granny with his or her favorite dessert
   For me, that was her classic lemon meringue pie
   fluffy white & brown giving way to
   perfect, translucent yellow
   A sweet slice of heaven on a heavy china plate.

Fall gave way to winter, and with it just enough freezing nights
   to insure those same scuppernong vines
   would yield a fresh crop in the coming year.
   It meant we got to decorate my Granny's
   small, artificial Christmas tree however we wanted.
   Too much tinsel, but that's ok, baby.
   And every year, sparklers on Christmas Eve,
   maybe a firecracker or two on the road
   as long as no cars were coming.

Those cold days were about firing up the
   low, metal gas heaters, taking turns standing near them,
   carefully rotating our bodies when one side
   was too hot, the other too cold.

Spring always felt like Granny's favorite season
   It was a time to wear pink, a time to celebrate Easter,
   A time to plant and to take trips all over the county,
   smiling and hugging necks, reminding everyone she saw
   Friends are family, too.

Warmer days meant she no longer had to kneel next to the tub,
   but she could wash her long, silver hair
   outside under the faucet
   before heading down to the beauty shop.
   We would sit & watch the magic happen, as waist-length locks
   were twisted & collected, piled high atop her head
   in the beehive she wore until the day she left this Earth.

Every year was a good year, even when bad things happened.
   Maybe an overzealous grandson had
   broken her ribs giving her her first go-kart ride.
   Or perhaps he had artistically reshaped all the
   pictures in her photo album with the craft scissors.
   Or gotten himself locked in the chifferobe,
   wondering whether it was better to call out
   and give himself away as a rule breaker
   or just stay there and hope The Lord
   came back before she could find him.

Every year was a good one, filled with perfectly-shaped biscuits
   and coconut cakes; fluffy slippers and
   fuzzy pink house dusters; open-toed shoes
   no matter what the weather was like.
   And above it all, love and patience and a commitment
   to family. We'll remember those things when we see
   a sofa with little pink flowers on it, or when
   we drink just a sip of coke to help wake us up
   from our afternoon nap.
   We'll remember when we see a hydrangea, reminding
   us that just around the corner,
   here comes comes the spring.