Another One Bites the Dust

The backstage area was an absolute mess when I started here.

This year we've tackled a lot of it. We've sorted through the flats to toss out the torn and the broken. We found hammers and paintbrushes in all sorts of unimaginable places and relocated them to a newly-designated tool closet. We've converted my office backstage into a dressing/current-show-storage room. We broke apart the more dangerous pieces of scenery, salvaged the screws and found a storage place for good scrap wood. We reorganized the big pieces of scenery backstage to make the area navigable and safe. We even took a stand against the wrestling team storing their giant (GIANT) wrestling mats backstage and moved the mats to the wrestling room at the other end of the building.

This week was the granddaddy, the peak, the Everest of the clean-up. This week we tackled the costume shop.

The costume shop is a narrow room at the top of a shaky set of stairs backstage. Due to some ... supervisional issues from the teacher before me, I was only granted a key to that room when I swore that no students would be allowed up there unless I was standing in the room with them.

And so I put off that room until we had cleaned up everything else. With the other projects I could make several hot-spot-small-group assignments to a class and then migrate from place to place to supervise, assist, and answer questions. The costume shop was not large enough for an entire class, though, and I was not about to leave 20 kids down below alone while I supervised one group upstairs.

I knew I would be staying after for Grad Night yesterday, so I put out an invitation to both my drama classes that anyone who was willing to come help clean up the costume shop would be more than welcome.

We started with 8 kids. We finished with 2. (Not because the other 6 were buried under giant piles of fabric or anything - they just had to go home.) But by golly, we cleaned it. When we started, we had to shove shoulder-to-door to get into the room because so much stuff was piled on the floor. And now the junk is gone, the remainder is either hung or boxed and all is labeled. (In fact, we filled 1.5 of the school's dumpsters with junk from that room.)

As great as that feels (and, believe me, it feels great), I am especially proud that there are teenagers in the world who would gladly spend four hours cleaning out a dusty, musty, disgusting room simply because I asked for help.



Man, I like teenagers.