Tonight, I attended the Holiday Extravaganza at the West
Potomac High School, in Fairfax County, VA, near Route 1 and relatively close (2
miles) to the Huntington and Franconia Metro stations in Alexandria. The drama
event was held in the wide Kogelman Theater, the smaller of the two auditoriums
in the Arts and Media Building, which is actually separated from the main
campus building.
The program, 135 minutes (long for high school) comprised
two one-act comic plays (a practice
sometimes seen with opera), and an intermediate skit.
The first play (“Act One”) was “The Trial of Santa”, by Don
Zolidi (about 25 min). In our litigious society, someone sues Santa Claus for invasion of
privacy and discrimination. Remember all
the old commands to “be good” or someone would tell Santa? (I even remember when my parents told me the “truth”
about Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny – we were in the family car, having just
left the house). This was a comedy
where Santa isn’t allowed any lap dances.
The program, parents were warned, was PG-13.
The “intermezzo” was a skit based on Shakespeare’s “A
Midsummer Night’s Dream”, based on the idea of putting a love potion on someone’s
eyes to control who she will fall in love with.
It’s an idea for people who can’t face later jealousy.
There was a quick intermission, in situ (no refreshments),
and then came the main event, an hour-long “Act Two”, “Every Christmas Story
Ever Told (and then some!)”, by Michael Carleton, Jim FitzGerald, and John K.
Alvarez. The play consists of a long series of dialogues following the model of
Saturday Night Live (on Friday night), to make fun of almost everything. There was a lot of audience participation of
sorts, from actors planted in the audience who would join on the stage. The lights would dim and come back on. It was hard to discern any specific structure
to the play, but just about all of pop culture took a beating. A couple of the parts donned a wig, in
impersonation of Norman Bates. Did you
know that Justin Timberlake cross dresses?
Or much about the personal life of Marley? (Movie reviews May 1, 2012)/ Or was that the dog of Marley and Me (with
Owen Wilson hovering)? Rudolf may make a
good boyfriend before running the Alaskan Iditarod? Or that Rudolf got involve in a trademark and
copyright fight? I thought it was
interesting that each of two high school plays would mention, with comic
effect, our society’s obsession with lawsuits – over a number of issues. It seems as though the writers are fans of
Electronic Frontier Foundation and are familiar with the problems caused by copyright
and patent trolls. There were some early jokes about "fruitcake" (Christmas "comfort food") and "nuts" (or nutmeg). I was expected to hear
“don’t ask don’t tell” to get mentioned.
Not quite, but close. Yes, all PG-13.
I couldn’t quite match the characters to the program. Some
of the actors had trouble with the acoustics in the auditorium, but Eddie
Perez (one of the directors) was always exceptionally
clear and forceful.
The theater is ringed with posters of controversial plays
that students have produced there. These
include “Titanic”, “Les Miserables”, “Inherit the Wind” (with that old time
religion), “Class Acts”, “The Boy Friend”, and “The Caucasian Chalk Circle”. I could almost imagine “Do Ask Do Tell” if it
existed yet.
Outdoors, in the lobby, there are some exhibits of student
art work.
I do have a history with the school, as a substitute teacher
from 2004-2005. I’ll come back to that
in a moment, but I do want to mention that the school has an elaborate film
editing lab (the only other comparable lab I saw as a sub was at the Arlington
Career Center). An AP chemistry class in
June 2005 made a short comic sci-fi film about a new element called “Reltonium”
(named after a chemistry teacher). Imagine
the possibilities. It’s embedded in a
virus (maybe like crystalline astatine), so unstable that it can let the virus
house a microscopic mini black hole, so that when people are infected, they can
trade identities or bodies (actually happens in an episode of “Smallville”, but
there are interesting theoretical possibilities – but we don’t need a fourth “Invasion
of the Body Snatchers” film.
The school, in a very mixed area and not the most
prosperous, has always offered an atmosphere that is an interesting mixture of
conservatism (there is an ROTC Academy – which sent a team to another
Alexandria concert that I reviewed here Nov. 11. 2007) and progressivism,
leveraging technology and sometimes willing to challenge social norms and
proprieties. No other school at which I
subbed was quite as “enigmatic”. A few
of the AP and honors students were truly
outstanding. (Bryant Alternative, and
Mount Vernon are each a few miles down Route 1, not far away, but very
different in culture). Another oddity,
maybe a coincidence, is that that the varsity sports teams are called “Wolverines”,
the name of the team in the movie “Red Dawn”.
There was an unsettling incident there when I was substitute
teaching in 2005. I have explained the
matter in detail on my “BillBoushka” blog with the entry on July 27, 2007
(merely navigate there through Blogger Profile). It took a lot of coincidence, including
unusual items getting published a particular week in October 2005 in competing
newspapers, to trigger the incident. It
is apparent, however, that some staff and perhaps others must have been
distracted by some material I had published on the web (in fact, a particular
fictitious screenplay for a short film) and that could have been found by
search engines. This whole matter
occurred just before the major media was noticing that the Internet was
creating “online reputation” issues and creating conundrums for employers and
schools. Facebook, at that time, had
been invented but wasn’t fully public, and Myspace had been well known for less
than a year.
So going back was a bit of a pilgrimage. It is a 10-mile drive from north Arlington,
through difficult traffic, and changing patterns. The Route 1 area is extremely congested during
rush. Curiously, though, as I spotted
Quanderer Road and turned on the isolated, winding road, I felt that I was
almost back in Tolkien country.
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