Beginnings can be fun. They can also be scary and disorienting, but that’s not what this article is about. If you watch people at the beginnings of careers, school years, or romances, you are likely to see eager, excited faces. At beginnings, major mistakes haven’t been made, reputations haven’t been formed, and all things seem…
We have more time than children do. Sometimes it feels as if we have less time, but that’s only when we’re thinking about time that hasn’t really happened yet. They probably have more of that, but so what? It hasn’t happened yet! To children, a year seems like forever. We sometimes talk about the impatience…
Life is partly having to say you’re sorry. I’m sorry, but it is. So is love. Sometimes we do things we don’t mean to do, or things we mean to do that have effects we don’t mean to have, and someone else is hurt, annoyed, embarrassed, angered – someone wishes we hadn’t done it. Sometimes…
The Constitution says there aren’t supposed to be any laws abridging freedom of religion in this country. Considering the way religion has been treated around the world throughout history, I think we’ve done a relatively good job so far. But that same document was written “to form a more perfect union.” So I guess we’ve…
Last week, I tried to speak for non-thespians. I’m not a non-thespian. I’ve worked with many children who’ve shared my love for drama, and I think I can write with more confidence about what’s going on for us when we rehearse and perform. When we do things well, we like to be appreciated. Sometimes all…
I was going to write an article about the joy children feel when they get to be in a play. I was all set to write it. Then the anxious faces of several children appeared in my mind, and these children seemed to be asking me to write, first, about the joy of not having…
Memory doesn’t light all the corners of our minds equally. There are several different kinds of memory. I taught about six hundred children, and I think I could identify about 300 by their pictures (taken at the time I taught them). That’s pretty good. But I’m taking a course in Feldenkrais movement, in hopes of…
I’ve gradually discovered that most children, and most adults, march to the tune of a different drummer. Nobody is like everybody else, and yet most people, at various points in their lives, feel isolated – wish that they were “normal,” like everyone else. It may be that the only one who really is isolated is…
There are things you’d like to do all the time, but you don’t do them in public. And things you never want to do, but you do them in public. There may even be behaviors you rule out entirely in both public and private, but you harbor secret fantasies. And the reason? It’s against the…
What about the mistakes we’ve made? How can we make sure our children don’t make them? We don’t want our children to have to deal with the awful consequences we’ve had to deal with. True, we’ve learned from our mistakes, but what is the ultimate use of all that learning if we can’t pass it…