2/6/18

Gathering Graces 2/5/2018

*I have always been a bit of a Watergate junkie.  I remember on my first trip to Washington D.C., seeing the Watergate Hotel, and thinking, “Oh, the stories those walls could tell.”  I have  read books, and have quite a collection of books about Watergate, and have read All The President’s Men at least five times.  Recently I have jumped on the podcast bandwagon, finding it something nice to have playing as I am knitting.  Imagine my excitement when I came across a podcast called Slow Burn: A Podcast About Watergate.  This podcast is at slate.com, and started last fall, and is an eight episode series. This is how Leon Neyfakh, the  writer and producer of Slow Burn, describes the podcast:
Why are we revisiting Watergate now? The connections between the Nixon era and today are obvious enough. But to me, the similarity that’s most striking is not between Donald Trump and Richard Nixon (although they’re both paranoid, vengeful, and preoccupied with “loyalty”), or their alleged crimes (although they both involved cheating to win an election), or the legal issues in the two cases (although they both center on obstruction of justice).
Rather, it’s that people who lived through Watergate had no idea what was going to happen from one day to the next, or how it was all going to end. I recognize that feeling. The Trump administration has made many of us feel like the country is in an unfamiliar, precarious situation. Some days it seems like our democratic institutions won’t survive, or that permanent damage has already been done. Pretty much every day, we are buffeted by news stories that sound like they’ve been ripped out of highly stressful and very unrealistic novels.
The point of Slow Burn is to look back on the most recent time Americans went through this en masse, and to put ourselves in their shoes.
If this part of history intrigues you, I recommend you take some time and listen.  Just go to slate.com/slowburn to find the podcast.
*The next two weeks in the after school drama program, we are focusing on Musical Theater, one of my loves.  It is so fun to work with these students, and to have them get excited about coming tomorrow with a song to sing.  We are going to learn the song Do Re Mi from The Sound of Music, and film it next week.  These kids are so awesome!!
*Paul headed off to play practice, and I got a few projects done that had been weighing on me, some for months!!  Isn’t it funny how a small little project can be put off and put off, and then  when you finally do it, it ends up taking a total of about 15 minutes to complete?  It felt good to check two of those type of projects of my to do list tonight.
*I had an unexpected but fun little exchange with a former KHS classmate.  A few days a week, I have some seniors come to my office at the end of the day to hang out and talk, and one of them is the great niece of Cecil McNutt, who I graduated from high school with in 1981.  Cecil and Dezi were texting back and forth, and so I asked Dezi to ask him if he remembered me, told her to say hello, and then Dezi and I took a photo together to send to Cecil. It was a fun little exchange.  Cecil lives up in Alaska, and is retired from the Coast Guard, and now, if I have this right, works for the Coast Guard up in Alaska.
*February is a time of transition.  As I start looking at seed catalogs and gardening websites to plan what I want to do in my vegetable garden this summer, I am also looking at my life, and what I want to do with it, not only this summer, but beyond.  If you are a gardener, looking at seed catalogs is very exciting, and holds a promise of new things to come.  And that is what February holds for me....a time to reflect and research about new things to come.

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