Almost…

Thursday, April 28, 2022

^{_{April “Pink Moon” Waning Crescent @5.7%; Next Full Moon, May 15.}}

Gee, Sunday will be the first day of May. We’re approaching the 2022 midpoint and summer solstice.

Where does time go?

Here in Central Oregon, that question is perpetual. Our transitional seasons, spring and fall, are short, too quickly over. We barely adjust to one transitional mode before time to get into the next. That’s one reason time seems to slip by.

I suppose today it’s on my mind because May happens to be my birthday month. Maybe a powerful reason to be mulling over the question. I could be in a transitional phase between having memory and losing it.

So far, so good, knock-on wood, and more.

So, I’ll pull up a memory. While in high school, where I grew up in Oklahoma, I became the star of my high school drama class. At the beginning of the semester, our assignment was to look for a “reading,” and edit it into a ten-minute spoken piece. The critical assignment was for students to memorize and interpret aloud, before an audience, their selected readings.

The drama instructor, Mrs. Ford, was a stickler for everything about speaking before an audience. We had to place ourselves and stand correctly. We had to limit our hand and arm gestures. Our eye contact had to be just so. Our vocalizations, including pitch and tension, had to match perfectly with our words and meanings. Mrs. Ford knew what she was doing and was not interested in being a fun teacher.

I loved drama class. I practiced and practiced, learned to do everything correctly and became the best presenter in the student group.

The high school sponsored me, with my reading, to the State Drama Championship competition at the [then] agricultural college in Norman, Oklahoma. I won, becoming Oklahoma’s designated representative to the National High School Drama Finals in San Francisco.

Thrilling for me and equally so for Mrs. Ford.

I didn’t fare as well in SF. The presenters and judges saw things differently from those at home. Those in SF liked my reading but judged it more as “acting” than “interpreting.” I’ve never agreed, but to be honest, my style was to throw myself entirely into a piece.

By the way, my chosen reading was an excerpt from a play entitled “Bury the Dead,” written in 1938 by Irwin Shaw.

Dear Friends: That’s a pleasant memory, my moment in the sun. Diana