Good evening—

On behalf of the cast and crew, I’d like to welcome you to the GHS Drama Club’s production of Crazy For You.

When we were choosing our shows for this year’s season, we decided to follow our hearts and our passions. For a transition year and for two directors’ debuts at GHS, we thought it best to utilize our strengths. We chose our fall production because of the director's infectious enthusiasm for Our Town. We chose this musical because it is a big dance show, and dance is what I know best. Looking back, however, I think both of us learned far more than we expected. We started in our comfort zones, and the magic of theater took us to a beautiful new place.

Crazy For You shamelessly celebrates the musical theater genre. It oozes dance, music, and laughter. It is over-the-top and sentimental. It breaks from reality and brings us directly into our characters’ dreams. It is often cheesy and cliché. But scattered among all of that shines a few simple messages: be brave enough to love, follow your passions, hold out for what you deserve, and let people give you a hand once in a while. And if you do that, your dream world might actually become a reality.

Like Zangler’s Follies and the people of Deadrock, Nevada, this cast and crew set out to put on a show, a big and challenging show. We didn’t do this to save a theater or make money, however. We did it because this is what we love. This is how we breathe, how we move through the stories of our lives with purpose and flare. This is how we learn to understand each other and ourselves. Through the production process, the fusing together of theatrical elements, we learn how to be better people.

Also, like the people of Deadrock, there were moments in this process when we found ourselves in the middle of everything, looking out, wondering how we’d make it through. In my life, I’ve often found solace in the messy madness of art, but I must admit there were moments this time around that seemed insurmountable. However, at each one of these moments, without fail, someone stepped up—sometimes it was a student; sometimes it was an adult; sometimes it was a friend or a parent. Regardless, we helped each other. We encouraged each other to keep a “stiff upper lip.” We “put on [our] dancing shoes and watched [our] spirits climb.” And the moment we collectively believed it, when we realized “we got rhythm” and “we got music,” was when it did come together. It was then we realized we couldn’t ask for a single thing more.

And that feeling is magical. It is the over-the-top, the dream-turned-reality. It is why we do this time and time again.

For that, I would like to say thank you to every person involved. To all of the designers and directors, students and adults alike—you helped actualize this vision. To the pit, thank you for providing the music that carried us through. To the crew, it is because of you that we feel like we’re “up among the stars.”

To every one else who supported us along the way, thank you. Parents, thank you for all of the rides and for supporting our crazy schedule. And thanks to the cast of The Complete Works of Shakespeare Abridged—your talent and time helped buy some of the instruments we are using tonight.

To the cast, you truly were a joy to work with. Every time you tap together, turn on the charm, or hit that last pose, I get chills. I feel like a little kid again. Never lose your passion and your energy. I am CRAZY FOR YOU.

She stands in the middle of the room.  But it is not just any room.  It is a room, like so many other rooms, that has defined so many moments in her life.  

She stands there in the pit, the lowest point of the whole place, the point where a piece of the magic begins.  She turns to the back of the room, looking upwards over hundreds of battered, worn seats, seeing shifty figures and faces that have occupied them through the years.  She sees the tears and the laughter, the intense attention and the restless boredom, the family, the friends, the faces of people who made a regular moment wholly unique and irreplaceable, never to be found exactly as it was again.

Her eyes travel up past those seats to the doors which welcomed those faces in, to the booth which controls other pieces of the magic.  She lets her eyes travel across the high ceilings and up to the catwalk, caging in streams of light which illuminate and inform the magic, hanging from above the pieces that will bring people and moments to life.

Then, ever so slowly, she allows her body to turn, facing a gaping hole--dimly lit, empty.  The floor gouged, splintered, worn.  Remnants of tape and paint and blood, sweat, and tears sprinkle the surface which so many have occupied before her.  Remnants of successes and failures--that she does not remember--haunt the space before her.  

And she is not sure she belongs in this room, like she has in others from before.  The pieces of the past do not speak to her here, the pieces of this room are still foreign, strange.  She stands there looking, questioning, hoping, that before too long that strangeness will disappear.  She stands there hoping that the various pieces of the magic she knows so well will come together for her here.  

Because then, standing in the middle of things will feel less daunting.

It is simple.  It is true.

It is the living, breathing mushy stuff.

It's a solid "me and you."

Two hearts pumping and beating together.

It's as simple as "I love you."

When I'm worried, I think of...

First snowstorms

Flakes fluttering through bitter cold

Fireplaces lighting the dark

Steady hands and a gentle kiss calming my nerves

Teachers inspire me.

A poem given to us at our last department meeting.  

After almost two full hours of debate and complaining and whining and griping (sometimes rightfully) about anything and everything that needs to get accomplished but can't because we are only human and can only be expected to do so much, I am so grateful to have received this piece of writing.  

Its simplicity and poignancy reminded me why I do this.  It's not the CAPT scores or the piles of  college recommendations or papers or duties or web portals or professional objectives or whatever else's.  It's the students sitting in front of us.  It is the faint recognition, the pieces of me I see sitting in front of me.  It is the lessons I struggled so hard to learn.  It is the lessons I learned the wrong way.  It is the passion I had then that was stifled too early.  It is the purity and innocence I see before me.  And before that innocence is lost, I want to do something, say something, or not say something to help that purity become what is possible.  

Even though I am tired everyday, I don't regret a second I spend with my students, for my students, because of my students.  This is a life choice.  This is dedication.  This is for them.  Because I was them, and if it weren't for a very small few, I might not have become the me I am now.  

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in my first year, when i teach geography to seventh graders,

one little girl's voice faintly

reminds me of one of my college friends and

i almost give her an A just because she's an echo

of someone who formed a vital layer in me.

over the years I have more students who drift into 

reminders of people in my past;

sometimes I recognize the resemblance immediately,

like the profile of the low appalachian ridge outside the window,

and sometimes it hits me mid-year and,

having created the borders of the connection, 

i then chart the inlands,

embellish and illuminate mountains, floodplains, and

valleys with memory.

i wonder if we all listen to our students for echoes--

in the lilt of a laugh, or how one's hair parts in the middle,

like the friend we had in thenth grade

who wore mega-sweaters and leggings.

or in the turn of a phrase,

the cadence of a question,

the way a hand is slowly raised like the long neck of a dinosaur

in those long-ago science hand-outs,

that smelled like sweet cereal and purple ink.

each september it's as if we have a new chance

to fumble through the past, 

to listen for echoes of ourselves that inexorably decay 

as they resonate and ripple

off the earthtone and crumbly layers

of time, of characters in books, of friends and old lovers--

--and sometimes of the dead,

who we unearth for an hour or so each day; 

time enough to quietly say hello,

how you doing?  I'm glad you're still with me

in this young mind sitting across the canyon, across the great divide.

--Simao J. A. Drew  (teaches literature and language at Liberty High School in Eldersburg, Maryland, and is a member of the adjunct faculty at Frederick Community College.  At the Gifted and Talented Summer Centers sponsored by the Maryland State Department of Education, he teaches creative writing.  His poems have appeared in literary magazines including Scarab and Sandstone Review.)

From old notebook covers and college doodles comes Shakespearean wisdom. Oh, how timely and prophetic.

Our wills and fates do so contrary run

That our devices still are overthrown

Our thoughts are ours; their ends

none of our own. 

--Hamlet