That Was Then...

...this, as the saying so rightly points out, is now.

I recently blogged about the passing of my former drama teacher, Joan Bedinger. The combination of her passing and the greetings from some people I haven't heard from in ages (Alan Eisenberg's got a very interesting and educational blog about resources for thinking about and dealing with bullying here) put me in a bit of a nostalgic mood and I went rooting around the attic today to find my box of scrapbook stuff from high-school and earlier.

Here's a great picture I found of Joan:




It was weird going through the scrapbook, in some ways painful (high school was by no means the "best years of [my] life") but also oddly instructive. Here are a couple of random thoughts that passed through my mind:

Man, this seems like a LOOOOOONG time ago. That could be, perhaps, because it was. I was trying to think when was the last time I seriously sat down and looked at these pictures, and wondered if it had been decades. I guess that's one difference between being young and middle aged. It used to be that the only things I could measure in decades were future things. Past things were always measured in days, months, or years.

I remembered I had a letter from Joan when I graduated. It was weird to read it and think that she was now dead. An even more strange feeling came when, going through the scrapbook, I found a second letter, one she sent to me while I was at college. It said that she missed having me around and hoped she would see me when I was next in the area, that she was and had always been a poor letter writer, but that she thought of me often and looked forward with pleasure to being able to catch up with each other's lives soon.

I suppose, looking back, that there was a part of me that was paradoxically jealous of and suspicious of her friendship. Sure, the inner cynic whispered in my ear, Joan said I was unique, and special, but she probably says that to everyone. Was she my friend, I sometimes wondered, or a cult-like personality who was collecting followers who could easily be replaced?

Memory is this bizarre thing. I had sort of constructed this memory of my college years of my making the effort to go back when the school had a show, to correspond, to visit when I was in town...My recollection was that these efforts were always appreciated but seldom reciprocated. I wondered now, as I re-read the second letter if that were only a partial truth. I tried hard to think back twenty some years and see if I could really remember not just my impressions but actual events. As with any friendship that ends not through conflict and/or a particular catalyst but through gradual drifting apart, thinking about this one was, admittedly, painful, and I think I understand that some of my revisionist memories might have been simply to dull that bittersweetness by focusing on those parts of the process I was not (or did not feel) responsible for.

Of course, my perspective is not only changed now by the fact that I am older but also that I am a teacher. While there are great spiritual and psychological rewards for teaching--my students enlighten me and enrich my life (okay, maybe not all of them but many of them)--there is also a painful truth that I understand now that I didn't then: if the best teachers are the ones who are willing to teach within the context of a personal relationship, a good teacher is forever investing herself or himself into relationships, the majority of which are not permanent--in people who grow up, move away, move on (and rightly so) to the next stages of their lives.

In this sense teaching can be analogous in some ways to parenting. I found some old programs for plays I was in while in high-school, and I was reminded through the program notes of how many of my fellow students used to call Joan "mom" and how I used to roll my eyes at that practice finding it unprofessional and too "familiar." A number of my fellow students also called her "Joan," which I could never bring myself to do, either, because it felt disrespectful; it wasn't and wouldn't be right for my particular idiom (pun intended). But I realize now that this practice was not necessarily a sign of brazen disrespect for her position nor of cheeky familiarity; it was--or at least could be--one of the higher forms of respect.

I also realize now that friendship isn't a zero-sum game. It isn't as though the meaningful friendships she had with other colleagues and students somehow diminishes the importance of the friendship she had with me. Actually, in my experience, the opposite is true--philia, like agape, enlarges a person rather than diminishes her; as we give, we grow and have more to give. I think now that the friendship she received back not just from me but from others no doubt enlarged and encouraged and sustained her to be able to give to the constant new stream of people in her life. Perhaps a better, more fitting legacy for such a friend would be to focus less on trying to figure out how special or unique our friendship was but on how typical it was...to think not about how special I must have been to deserve special friendship from amongst the sea of faces but about how special she must have been to be able to befriend so many.

The final thing I think about in reviewing my scrapbook is that I like that she is smiling. I was such a serious person in high school:



Things that had happened to me growing up...early exposures to violence and death probably influenced me more than I knew and taught me to look at the world as place where bad things happened. I think that's contributed to the fact that I've always been both drawn to and judgmental of people who are capable of enjoying life. I don't just mean hedonists or epicures, and I certainly wasn't cognizant at that time that I might tend to look down on such people because I envied their ability to enjoy life and not merely because they were all superficial. (I guess I thought I was superior to them on some level...I had faced reality...they would find out soon enough things were not all strawberries and cream.) I remember I didn't take a curtain call for the play I assistant-directed my senior year. I no doubt was suspicious of the transiency of happy moments and protective of my dignity and the decorum of the situation. I didn't like how the closing nights would be mawkish and the rhetoric would be inflated. Joan didn't force the routine on me, but she did let me know (in friendship) that she thought I was being stupid. "You worked hard," she said (or words to that effect), "why not enjoy your moment?"

One has to stop and smell the flowers now and then, and, you know, if they smell good, it won't kill you to smile at the pleasure of it.

I'm smiling now, mom.

Joan Bedinger

I received news this week that my former high school drama teacher, Joan Bedinger passed away this week. There is a memorial service in Fairfax, Virginia this Saturday.

If any of my blog readers are former W.T. Woodson people, feel free to e-mail me for directions. I understand there will be a memorial gathering this summer, too, for people who are unable to travel to the memorial service this weekend.

Joan was a creative and unique woman who managed to helped her students excel. She helped forge and create a (sub) community within the high school that provided a sense of belonging and participation during those tumultuous high-school years. While teaching students who were living a period of their lives in which emotions were like roller coasters, Joan managed to be both empathetic and a force of stability. She was the first teacher I ever counted a friend, and I recall going to her house at least once to watch the Redskins--a passion we both shared.

One conversation that I remember making an impression on me was when we were talking about athletes "hanging on" and she chided me (gently) for not realizing how hard it can be to give up something that has been a part of your life for so long. Without making too fine a point of it, she also related the conversation to a mutual acquaintance and helped me see that person in a new light.

Joan gave out an annual award for outstanding achievement in drama once a year to a graduating senior, and I was honored to receive that recognition in 1984. She chose me as her assistant director for the play "Barnum" that year, and I always appreciated that she was willing to delegate responsibility to students who were ready to take it.

I kept an informal correspondence with her for many years after high school, but it became harder as our circles grew apart and she had new students to nurture and teach. The last time I saw her was at a movie theater in Fairfax where she was screening the film "Chocolat" with an acquaintance. She had since retired from Woodson but was doing some community theater because it was her passion.

One thing I learned under Joan's tutelage was the importance of trying to take people as you find them and let them be who and what they are. I was newly religious in that phase of my life, and I sometimes found it odd to be hanging out with a bunch of drama freaks led by a chain-smoking, no-nonsense woman who praised students for expanding their horizons, taking risks on stage, and capturing and living in the "moment" (one of her favorite words).

I had several breakthrough moments as a performer in her classes--playing a heroin addict going through withdrawal in a play whose name I now forget¹; playing a fiercely independent blind man who had to learn to let his guard down just a little in Butterflies are Free; learning to use my budding writing talent to capture emotional truths without hiding behind my intellectual ability.

When I graduated from Woodson in the spring of 1984, I was seriously thinking of majoring in drama in college. By the time I arrived at Mary Washington in autumn, I had turned a corner and realized almost completely on my own that drama had been something for that phase of my life but was not a career goal. (Believe it or not, I realized even at age 18, that I longed for a career in which I could be mutually supportive of my colleagues and friends and not always be in competition for the same roles. While all jobs have some competition for promotion, the dividing and isolating power of that competition seemed especially prevalent in drama, and I sensed that my desire to make connections and be supportive would consume me and exhaust me if I devoted myself to a field where so many people needed that and could not reciprocate.) Nevertheless the things I learned from Joan's classes would serve me well in education. Teaching has elements of performance in it, and the confidence one learns from performing is a crucial skill necessary for public speaking, presentations, and preparation.

If, as Azar Nafisi said in Reading Lolita in Tehran, to leave a place is to learn to mourn for the person you once were while you were there, to mourn a person so strongly attached in your memory to a particular time and place in your life is to remember the role that another had in helping the person you once were become the person you now are. One can say truthfully of everyone one meets, "I would not be the same person I am today if I had not met her" for every moment and relationship leaves a mark on your soul. Some marks are deeper than others and some, while not as deep, are counted precious for other reasons. I'm a better person for having been taught by Joan, and that's saying a lot.

¹ (Later edit). I believe the title was A Hatful of Rain.