By Rockin' Eco Hero - Steve Trash®
I was 17 years old, had big plans, and I knew it all.
In fact, everyone but me was stupid.
My plan was brilliantly simple: I’d drop out of high school, move to Los Angeles, and be famous. To my way of thinking, it was a very good plan.
LA was the epicenter of show business. I wanted to be in show business. LA was the place to be, and I needed to be there right away.
I knew everything I needed to know, so why wait?
I couldn’t think of even one reason.
This is exactly what I told Mrs. Graham when I went to visit her.
My high school guidance counselor patiently smiled her adoring smile at my ignorant former self, and she said conspiratorially, “I want you to consider doing me a favor. Would you do that?”
I thought, “Sure. I love you Mrs. Graham. I will consider doing you a favor.”
She said, “I’d like for you to take a study hall, maybe even two, and write a senior play. I want you to include as many of your fellow classmates in this project as you can. This would be very valuable for school spirit. I would consider it a favor. Would you do that for me?”
I thought for a moment and asked her, “What are the limitations?”
She replied, “Just one: You can’t write it if you’re not a student.”
I thought, I can do that. I’ll just leave for LA right after I graduate. That would be fine.
These days, I often wonder if she chuckled a little bit as I left her office. She’d just pulled off a brilliant jiu-jitsu-ninja-trick to keep me in school and open up the world of writing for me – I’m dyslexic and do not enjoy reading or writing – and I had no idea any of it had just happened.
This wasn’t even the first time she had opened up new worlds to me.
She’d sponsored a week-long trip to Europe with many of my classmates. My mom (another brilliant woman) had scraped together pennies and paid for it; to this day I have no idea how my mom found the money.
Mrs. Graham showed me Mount St. Michelle, the crowded streets of Paris, the Punks causing a ruckus on The Tube in London – I got to see, feel, and experience it all.
She was great at letting you know you had value, merit, and that there is so much more out there you’re not aware of.
You must continue to seek that out. You must never be satisfied thinking you know it all.
She even did this in her humanities classroom.
As a class, we studied death and dying. Yeah… our HIGH SCHOOL class studied death. We took a field trip to a funeral home (there was even a STIFF in there … of course I touched his foot). We went to cemeteries and made grave rubbings of the epitaphs. We dressed up like folks from the Renaissance and had a feast.
She even allowed me to goof around with her medieval sword in class. I played out a scene in which a fight had spontaneously broken out between knights. I, of course, promptly accidentally broke her sword. She said, “Oh, that’s alright. It was a good battle.”
She put up with my crap and never blinked … not once.
There’s power in that.
I knew she believed in me. She thought there was something there.
I remember feeling, “If she thinks there’s something there … Maybe there’s something there.”
Very few grown-ups have ever made me feel that way.
She did.
So, as I walked out of the counselor’s office that day, Mrs. Graham had set me on a writer’s path. I knew I was a performer, and I knew I could be funny on stage and screen, but I needed to start down the road of writing the words, creating the concepts I could then perform.
I’d frankly never considered this – but I was considering it now.
Doing this senior play project checked all the boxes for me. We’d be doing it in front of the whole school; it would involve LOTS of people; and we had almost no limitations on what I could write.
Game on.
It was 1979, and Saturday Night Live (which had only launched on NBC two years earlier) was THE SHOW to watch. Everyone who was anyone knew what hilarity John Belushi, Lorraine Newman, Garret Morris, Gilda Radner, Chevy Chase, Dan Akroyd, and Jane Curtain had brought to television that week, so that’s where I started.
I wrote a sketch comedy show based on all the characters I adored from SNL. We had Killer Bees, we had a Weekend Update style segment, and we had suggestive jokes – I did get in a bit of trouble for those.
We even closed the show with a LIVE version of the Queen song “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Yeah … a LIVE version of a music video!
It was epic.
We stepped on a few Bradshaw High School authority toes. We got into a little trouble with “Wednesday Morning Live.” But we did it. It’s a really good memory, too.
Mrs. Graham passed away recently. I mourn her passing; I mourn the pain her family must have experienced in her late-life dementia; but mostly I celebrate her.
I celebrate her life.
It’s hard to describe how much her belief and support have mattered in my life. I hope I have taken her belief in me and pushed that goodness out to the world. It’s been a mission of mine, and I think she deserves a bit of the credit.
God bless you, Mrs. Graham. God bless your legacy. God bless all the good work you did over your lifetime as a teacher, as a counselor, as a believer in the worth of “us nutty kids.”
You mattered to a whole generation of kids.
You mattered to me.
You mattered.
Thank you.
Written by Rockin' Eco Hero - Steve Trash®
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