The Columbia High School Class of 2021 graduated on a picture perfect evening on June 24 at Yogi Berra Stadium, after a year…well, you’ve heard it all before.
Village Green covered the ceremony; you can read more about it here. For a more intimate (and irreverent) take on the event — which featured the usual excitement, pride, relief, as well as a healthy serving of technical and other glitches — check out this post by local author and performer Tori Chickering O’Connell, whose son Archie was one of the graduates. (Trigger warning: mild profanity ahead.)
I’ve never laughed so much at a graduation ceremony as today’s hilarious and excellent train wreck. Imagine the most glorious weather ever, but put 18 months of bullshit remote learning pandemic lockdown leading up to it and 545 exhausted kids Over It.
Then a third of the way into a predictable ceremony the mic cuts out for like 15 minutes. There’s a long awkward silence, then one woman shouts across the field with unabashed glee, “I love you, Joshua!!” and everyone cracks up. So of course I have to shout, “I love you, Archie!!” which encourages a cavalcade of other parents shouting their undying love for their embarrassed children. More laughter. Still no mic.
So we’re watching these knuckleheads in red gowns try to get a wave off the ground and they’re failing miserably. And you can practically hear the collective minds of a thousand 50-year-olds saying, “Move over, dingbats, we’ll show you how it’s done.”
So the parents in the stands start the wave which wraps around to the kids who finally get their act together. And we go around the horn three, four times and the whole thing is so wonderful and loose and funny because these people have been to hell and back, and we ache for fun—are bursting with joy—and all the presumed pomp in the world can’t contain us.
I’m 30 seconds away from leading the bleachers in an a capella “Bohemian Rhapsody” when we get a modicum of sound back. The school principal cuts his own speech—more cheers—and the BOE President does his best. The first thing he says is “Don’t be afraid of failure” and the audience loses our minds with shouts and applause.
And they finally read the kids’ names using the shittiest sound system you’ve ever heard—worse than Charlie Brown’s mother—but by then we’ve all given up caring. So we cheer them on as they throw their mortarboards in the air and race towards each other in a big happy scrum instead of filing out as rehearsed.
And nobody hassles them because we all made it through. And, as we know now, everything else is small potatoes.
Follow Chickering, author of TWISTED FAMILY VALUES and Nookietown, at vcchickering.com and on Instagram @vcchickering.
