The Sound of Music

My director's notes for the program.

Come see The Sound of Music 

on 23-24 March at North Shore High School, Glen Head, NY.

Life is a movie too…Starring you,

your whole family is the cast and crew...that's a little secret between God and you

        - Stew, from the musical Passing Strange

A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer; it sings because it has a song.

        - Lou Holtz, professional football coach

...there ain't no other way, baby: I was born this way

        - Lady Gaga

No one gets to pick where she is born, to what family, how tall or talented or unlucky he will be. What each of us does with this becomes the drama of our lives. It’s a long series of trials, adventures, risks, and dangers as we try to figure out who we are.

Your life is the story of what you were born to do.

When we meet Maria, our beloved heroine in The Sound of Music, she's totally lost. She's preparing to be a nun, but it feels like a bad fit. She loves the nuns and the convent, but she feels incomplete and alone.  Only when she sings on the mountain does she feel like she belongs. “I go to the hills when my heart feels lonely... [and they] fill my heart with the sound of music...” Maria uses her beloved music to turn away from confronting her fears.

Maria, fortunately, isn't allowed to hide. Her mentor, Mother Abbess, pushes Maria from the stability of the convent and into the world. Maria needs to find her place in the world.  Mother Abbess knows that the most powerful enemy in the world is not the Nazis. It's the unwillingness to take important risks. She knows that we must be willing to face the fear of failure with the unending hope of finding ourselves.

Our production of The Sound of Music has a cast and crew filled with searchers. Not all of them are great test takers. They don't all do well sitting in desks all day. Some of them will probably not finish college. But these young people have a lot to give. Some are great musicians. Others can operate a professional lighting board. They can anticipate safety hazards in the dark and look out for each other. They can build a dress. They can use their voices to transport you from your long week to the mountains of Austria, take a text and turn it into something inspiring and beautiful.

Just as it takes a brave mentor like Mother Abbess to imagine what a lost child needs, it takes a brave community to imagine what a generation of children needs. North Shore is facing some tough challenges these days. In business, government, and our homes, the mountains look pretty daunting.  Can we afford to hide?

We dedicate this show to the many kids in our schools who are listening to the sound of their own music:  musicians, dancers, actors, builders, stagehands, seam rippers, runners, point guards, trainers, fullbacks, short stops, painters, chefs, mechanics, designers, electricians, pitchers, goalies, robot builders, poets... all of them. Because these kids were born this way.

Welcome to the third and final piece of 2011-2012, our Season of Change.

The Friendly Skies

“You'll have to turn that off.”

The flight attendant stared at her crossly, his company blue blazer squeezing his shoulders.

“Excuse me, ma'am. You have to turn that off.” Her eyes didn't leave her magazine. Either she couldn't hear the steward or she was ignoring him. He bristled and stopped the pre-flight safety instructions.

The whole plane was suddenly involved.

“Ma'am! Turn that off that electronic device right now!” I looked around the plane. Eyebrows raised. A few people shared smiles. I turned around in my seat so I could get a better look. Halfway down the aisle, a stewardess shifted from foot to foot anxiously.

The passenger looked up slowly from her magazine. She drawled her response. “It's off. See?”

“You'll have to take out your headphones.”

“But it's off.”

He stared down at her. “The headphones have to come out.”

She shook her head and took out one headphone. For a moment, she silently dared him to demand the other phone. Satisfied, for the moment, the steward returned to his work. It's very important to know that your seatbelt operates with a latch mechanism.

She caught me smiling at her.

As a teacher, I've seen that a thousand times: authority versus rebellion. It looks like a question of enforcement or control. It's a tempting perspective. It looks like a test of wills, a “high noon” standoff. It's not. It's really a question of culture.

People in authority make the culture. They are the tone-setters, the weather-makers. Sometimes the person in charge of a situation makes the rules; sometimes she doesn't. No matter what the rules are, however, the authority figure has the greatest impact on the tone and civility of a situation.

Our flight attendant stopped being a leader and became a member of the mob. He did this because he made the interaction personal. In that moment, he became more interested in his own personal experience than he was in being the leader. His lack of focus on the job at hand made the situation far worse than it could have been.

As a teacher, a mentor, and an art director, I've learned that good leadership is all about culture setting. Create an environment of fluid stability and people will follow you almost anywhere.

Be a better leader:

1. Be kind. No matter what. It's not about being nice. It's about setting the tone of discourse.

2. Be professional. It's not about you personally. Ever.

3. Be clear. If your people don't understand you, that's your fault.  And your problem.

4. Pay attention. Respect all input and use as much of it as you can to achieve your goals.

5. Set enforceable boundaries. Negotiating them is the last resort.

6. Be charming. It's not your job to be liked. But they'll do a lot more for you if they like you.

If you get to be the one in charge, focus on the culture of those who look to you. The best way to avoid the midair collisions of poor group dynamics is to make the skies as friendly as possible.

Boredom Is Learned

Part Two in my series on Curiosity.



There are no bored three year olds. They don't exist. Three year olds want to know everything: they explore the worlds through their eyes, hands, and mouths. Not always in that order. And that doesn't begin to describe a child in the presence of a strong odor, like fresh cookies or dog poo, or a loud sound, like fireworks or bird chatter. The five senses are hubs of great activity. The world is a whirling carousel of interesting things to a child. Things shimmer with possibility and purpose. Three year olds NEED to know everything.

So why don't thirteen year olds? Or thirty or forty or fifty year olds, for that matter?

I don't know. I suspect it has to do with the hidden cost of experience. As we grow and learn, we get energized by what is fresh and novel. Things happen that we don't expect. It's a ride! We experience something, we are thrilled/horrified/seduced/shocked by it, then expect to experience it again. Or expect it to change. Either way, by the very nature of learning, we use past experience to shape our present experiences. We know the world through the comparison between what happened yesterday and today. We feel wise when we recognize what's about to happen. We celebrate our ability to see the patterns in things; we reward those with the most correct answers. Our lives become safer and more stable as we become more steeped in the “causes and effects” of the world.

But something happens: as we grow, these expectations begin to erode our ability to experience something on its own terms. We experience fewer things that surprise us. We are constantly predicting what's going to happen-- and, often, we are right.

Life is scary! Predicting what's going to happen makes it bearable. Sometimes, it's the only difference between safety and danger.

The cost is that we often don't see everything that's there. We begin see ONLY the patterns that we've seen before; we focus on what's predictable and often miss the things that we don't expect.

As Sherlock Holmes tells us, we see what we expect to see.

And so, we learn to stop learning.

And that's how I define boredom: the result of displacing the wildness of curiosity with the stability of predictability.

We return to the three year old. Driven by curiosity, a child has no room for boredom. He wants to learn everything. As he grows, the preponderance of experience wears down his interest in the world, like the ocean lapping at an enormous stone on the beach. The sharp edges of curiosity, through predictability and experience, become the smooth contours of boredom.

How do we stop this erosion?

Do we even want to?

The Tyranny of Consistency

BP is going to be just fine.

No matter how many things are screwed up by this mess, BP will be F-I-N-E.

Why? Because WE are fine with it. You and I are like, basically, ok with it. And not because we are amoral or apathetic.

It's because of the Tyranny of Consistency.

To illustrate, I thought I'd share a little anecdote about two students, Emma and Jose. These are not their real names.

Emma submits her work with a mechanical precision. She crafts her responses, building arguments upon well articulated evidence culled from the texts, delivering elegant essays (double spaced!) that include flawless documentation. She includes jokes. Emma writes fine papers; she peppers her prose with a patina of smartly shaded idioms. English teachers pray to Ancient Greek gods to send students like Emma.

She listens, she contributes, she modifies her work. She grows.

Jose abandons his work with the ease of a drunk aristocrat. He belches his responses, constructing arguments mitigated by energy-drink chemistry, trailing dog-eared looseleaf that includes dozens of errors in punctuation and spelling. He adds insult. Jose writes lousy papers; he smears his prose with a quilt of carelessly sewn non-sequitur. English teachers pray to Ancient Greek gods to smite students like Jose.

He refuses, he dismantles, he plays by few rules. He festers.

One day, Emma is late with a paper; it's her first time being late with anything. The teacher, despite his waterproof rules regarding tardiness, allows her a day to make up the work that she gratefully accepts.

Jose, on the other hand, has been on time once out of dozens of times. Through experience, he knows the teacher’s calculation for late points better than the teacher himself. Jose, who appears to notice nothing, notices Emma’s reprieve. He tells his mother and she gets on the phone with the teacher’s supervisor. Within two weeks, the staff of the school receives an email from the principal about the importance of consistency and fairness.

What's this have to do with BP?

Jose weighs the cost of working against the cost of the consequences. He's wagered that our school doesn't want justice; it wants stability. Or, at least, the appearance of stability.

And Jose, like BP, has made a good bet.

The idea of “fairness” rests squarely at the heart of what is often called “common sense.” Unfortunately, fairness and consistency have become interchangeable. When we say “fair,” what we most often mean is “stability preserving.”

Worse, we’ve muddled it more by confusing “fairness” with “justice.” We've figured out that the only way to be “fair” is to do things which will rock the boat the least. To make the system work "justly," we believe that tomorrow must be as predictable as today.

The problem rests in a system that is founded on the idea that creating consistency is the BEST means to create stability and fairness. But that mess in the Gulf is no example of stability, and neither is Jose and his mother's puppetry of our principal.

To change, we all need to challenge ourselves to face our own part in this. Our schools are simply manifesting the values of our culture. Schools didn't invent the idea of conflating justice with consistency. Schools didn't create a world that loves stability at almost any cost.

Our culture did. And, in case you didn't notice, you and I are a conspirators.

What are we trading for this stability, this consistency, that we treasure so much?

I'll tell you what I'm going to do tomorrow: I'm going to drive my car to work. My car that always starts when I turn the key. The car I drive, everyday, the same route 35 minutes each way to work.

The car I fill up, sometimes, at BP. Vroom vroom.