That’s Right Nate

Tom Rathbun seemed staid in the role of Abraham Lincoln and suffered from poor costuming during his uninspiring reading of the Gettysburg Address

This week, I was forced to sit through yet another pathetic display of misplaced values at my daughter Emily’s school.   She’s a 6th grader, but frankly I cannot wait until she can finally drop out of that place once and for all.  This week, was the Memorial Day Celebration for parents.   Sadly, there was hardly any celebrating.   My daughter was one of a collection of 6th graders who sang Dire Straits’ “Brothers in Arms”.   Later, she played the caretaker of an old veteran returning to Normandy.   This thing was 2 hours of non-stop scenes, vignettes, and songs decrying the inhumanity of war.

What made this totally inexcusable is after my daughter told me of her rehearsals a month ago, I sent her teacher a 15 page script for what would have been an unbelievably kick ass production. You can’t tell me that Emily’s entire class covering Sgt. Barry Sadler’s Ballad of the Green Berets wouldn’t have been far more moving or that they couldn’t have found one 8th grade boy capable of delivering George C. Scott’s classic no retreat, no surrender speech from Patton. If our students do not know of the glory of war, how will they ever be ready for the battles that they will have to fight in the future. My daughter’s Memorial Day presentation seemed to be all about death and dying.

Now, the teacher didn’t tell me that my show ideas were bad, but she refused to try to implement them saying that there wasn’t enough time this year. Unfortunately, the principal and Local School Council backed her up, but I am very hopeful for next year that we can get this in. Ever since the school’s 80% Mexican version of My Fair Lady, I’ve found their performing arts way below the quality expected from one of the supposedly better schools in Chicago. The problem is all these other parents are just thrilled to see their child on stage in a costume that they refuse to be impartial critics. They actually gave a standing ovation at the end. I felt like I was the nut for sitting respectfully with my hands in my lap.

Death is an unfortunate side effect of war, but without the sacrifices made by previous generations we would never have freed the slaves, stopped Hitler, or helped the Iranians peacefully exert influence in Iraq. Dying gloriously in battle is not the worst thing that could happen to a man and I like to think that if I had been born at a different time or of a different socio-economic group I would not have hesitated to put my life on the line for my heterosexual brothers.  I give the Bilandic Elementary School Memorial Day Celebration 2009 a rating of 2-stars.   There are many better ways to spend an afternoon and this is really only worth seeing if you have a child in the cast.