All the world’s a stage
And all the men and women merely players
They have their exits and their entrances
And one man in his time plays many parts

As You Like It

I wanted to write about the fun end-of-year assignments Noah’s had recently—playing John Calvin at the Medieval Mixer and Sir Toby in a scene from Twelfth Night—and how his homework load has lightened to the extent he actually spent a good bit of Memorial Day weekend doing things other than schoolwork.  But then he came home Tuesday having remembered he’s supposed to have been keeping a journal on the Shakespeare unit since early April. He’d only written one entry and it was due soon, maybe Friday, he wasn’t sure. So maybe it would have been a good idea for him to have worked a little more during the long weekend after all…

Act I: John Calvin (Medieval Mixer)

Nevertheless… it is true he has had some fun assignments recently.  For the mixer each student was assigned a historical figure from the Medieval or Renaissance periods.  They had to write a two-page paper about their figures and give a speech from that person’s perspective.  Then they had to dress as their characters and mingle with each other, speaking as these people would if they had ever met.  Noah said his plan for the ad-lib part of the mixer was to tell everyone he encountered that they were predestined to go to hell, and I thought it was an excellent idea, but for some reason he didn’t do it.

Nonetheless, he did enjoy the exercise and he cut quite a figure as the Protestant reformer. Beth made his hat and sewed the furry collar onto his robe.  I went beard shopping at a theater supply store but they only had the kind you attach with spirit glue and we thought this would be too time consuming to apply and remove so Beth ordered him a beard online. (I found it somewhat ironic it was a gray beard because at the theater supply store the clerk asked Noah’s hair color and I said it was similar to mine, and he said, rather unnecessarily, “But without the gray?”)

Intermission: Long Weekend

The mixer was the Friday before the long weekend.  Beth took that day off and drove to Wheeling where she spent a few days visiting her brother. While she was gone I was very busy with gardening and housecleaning and grocery shopping and I needed to work a little, ghost-writing a blog post on carrots and cauliflower.  But the kids and I had fun, too.

Friday afternoon we hosed all the dust and pollen off the front porch, which is their favorite chore and one we only do once a year because it’s kind of a production getting all the porch furniture onto the lawn and then back onto the porch. That night I let them eat dinner (frozen pizza) in front of the television, which is another rare treat. We binged on PBS cartoons, watching Martha Speaks, Word Girl, and Curious George, or June and I did. Noah came into the living room to eat and he did watch Word Girl but after that he was in the room but doing something on his phone.

Saturday night June had a sleepover with Megan. I’d asked Megan’s mom if I could send June to play at their house so I could get some work done and she saw my play date and raised me a sleepover. I did some work while June was gone, but on finding myself alone with Noah, it seemed a better idea to take him out to dinner at Roscoe’s, have gelato at Dolci Gelato, walk all the way home and read a couple chapters of The Hunger Games.  We read at least ten chapters over the course of the weekend and came close to finishing it.

Monday afternoon I took the kids to the pool and then came home and made strawberry shortcakes with the perfectly ripe strawberries I’d bought at the farmers’ market on Sunday.  Beth came home as I was making them and we had a picnic of hot dogs, baked beans, devilled eggs, corn on the cob, watermelon, and of course, the shortcakes.  It was good to have her back home.

Act II: Sir Toby (Shakespeare Scenes)

Tuesday everyone was back to school and work. Noah wrote part of another Shakespeare journal entry that night but he seemed stuck, so I sent him to bed, forty-five minutes after his bedtime, with the entry unfinished.  Wednesday he had better luck.  After working on algebra and studying for a Spanish test, he tackled the journal entries again and this time he finished all but the last one. I stayed in the room with him as he wrote, reading him the questions he needed to answer. He would answer verbally and then I’d say, “Write that down.”  This often helps get him unstuck when he has writer’s block. He was pleased to have made so much progress on what had seemed like a daunting assignment but he did note it would have been a better idea to have written them as he went along, as he was supposed to have done. Lesson learned, perhaps?

Thursday afternoon Berth and went to Noah’s school to see the Shakespeare performance and right before it started I was talking to his teacher and found out exactly when the journal was due, as Noah was still unsure. The answer was all the entries except the last one—coincidentally the ones he’d written mostly in one night just the night before—were due the next day but the last one—which he hadn’t started—wasn’t due for a week. It was quite the stroke of luck.

The performance was of selected scenes from four different plays—MacBeth, Othello, Twelfth Night, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Noah was in the Twelfth Night group. Over the course of six weeks the whole class read A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream together and then the kids were split into groups read overviews of the other plays, selected a scene or two, set it in a new time and place, designed a set, assembled costumes, and rehearsed.

There was a MacBeth scene in which Banquo’s ghost made an appearance in a 1950s diner, another in which the witches make their predictions in a Saudi Arabian desert, etc.  I was not always able to tell what the new setting was supposed to add to the scene, but I thought the steampunk version of Othello might have been trying to take advantage of anachronism to stress the universality of jealousy, ambition, and violence.  I knew Noah’s group chose to set their scene in West Berlin of the 1980s because there are references earlier in the play to divisions in society, which they wanted to stress. With some guidance from us, Noah decided to wear a white t-shirt and khakis because the outfit was classic enough to work in pretty much any Western setting from the 1950s to the present and then he borrowed Beth’s demin jacket from college, an authentic 1980s relic, though not German.

Overall, the scenes were entertaining. All the kids seemed to know their lines and there was some good acting and it looked like everyone was having a good time.  Later Noah said he and other kids in his group had stumbled over some of their lines, but I honestly didn’t notice. I told him I thought because he knew the scene so well he could hear the mistakes they made that the audience and the members of other groups would miss.

Act III: Honoree (Middle School Awards Ceremony)

That very same night there was an awards ceremony for Noah’s middle school held at a nearby high school. We knew he was getting an award but not why.  Last year all the members of the band got awards because of their high-scoring performances at competitions over the spring. I thought it could be that again, though the band, under the less experienced leadership of a new director did not do quite as well as last year—still well, but not as well. So there was a pleasant amount of curiosity and anticipation about what the award might be going into it. In the car on the way there Beth speculated that all the seventh-grade Humanities magnet students would get an award for surviving the IDRP (interdisciplinary research paper) they wrote last fall. I thought it could be GPA-related because he had nearly all As last quarter.

We split up because honorees were sitting in one section of the auditorium and guests in another. There was a musical interlude by the orchestra and choir and then the ceremony started. The first two sets of students honored were for straight As and perfect attendance. I knew Noah wouldn’t be in either of those groups because he’s never had straight As and he missed at least one day this year… but in the middle of perfect attendance they called his name. Was it a mistake? Did they not count absences on Easter Monday because it was originally supposed to be part of spring break? He had dentist and orthodontist appointments that day so we didn’t send him to school.

Beth took out her phone and brought up his attendance record on the school’s record-keeping site and he was not marked absent the day he’d missed.  So it was a mistake. My heart sank a little, knowing that after receiving an invitation, he would be disappointed if he didn’t get an award he’d actually earned. We watched him come up on stage, take the award and shake a line of teachers’ hands. He had no other choice, but I wondered if he felt as if he was playing yet another part, after a week of acting.

I scanned the list of awards on the program, wondering if he might win another, because you can win more than one. I’d actually noticed a lot of overlap between straight As and perfect attendance, perhaps not surprisingly.  I thought his best chances were a content area award for either media or music, which are his two passions.  There were fewer kids receiving these awards and they were announcing names alphabetically by first name.  During the media awards they went straight from a Nila to a Sierra, so no dice there. No music award either.  I looked at the program again, with less hope. He’s done well in science and Spanish, but I didn’t think he’d really “demonstrated a desire to extend [his] knowledge beyond the curriculum, and served as a model to [his] peers.”  The only real possibility left was geography bee, and only if there were awards for the winner from each world studies class in the school because he did win the geography bee in his period, though he was eliminated at the school-wide level.  But only the school winner was honored and that was it.

When we reunited with Noah, he said it had been disappointing but he didn’t seem too down about it. He and I talked about it this afternoon and agreed it might be a funny story some day, though right now it’s more annoying than humorous, especially since he stayed up late last night expanding his Shakespeare journal entries and it would have been nice to have more time for homework earlier in the evening.

End-of-the-year events are not over, of course. Next week Noah has a short band concert during the Arts Alive event at his school and June’s afternoon class will have their third and final publishing party.  I am looking forward to seeing them play the parts of musician and writer, as those are among their favorite roles.