Post 67 - May 17, 2020
Day 67…
When I was in high school and had to choose which college I wanted to go to, I ultimately chose where I went as much for where it was as for what I could learn there.
I knew that I eventually wanted to live in New York City.
I knew enough, however, from my sheltered upbringing in suburban New Jersey that I wasn’t ready to live in New York City on my own.
Going to school in New York would, I thought, be a great way to transition to the real world.
And it was.
I had a perfectly fine time in high school.
Parts of it were miserable, but really, it was fine.
I had great friends.
I was a band and theatre kid so, of course, was picked on by the jocks and cheerleaders.
Some of the jocks and cheerleaders, however, turned out to be as ambitious as the rest of us geeks were, and ended up in our classes.
By senior year, we all started studying together and became friends.
Cheerleaders and band geeks and football players and theatre geeks would meet up after school and discuss life and write essays together.
And laugh.
I had some great teachers in high school that inspired me and set me firmly on the path that I am on today, but those friends did as much or more for me than my teachers did.
I was a smart, pretty happy kid who was completely clueless about life.
And I knew it.
I showed up at Columbia University with a fair amount of basic knowledge and close zero life experience.
(Mom, you may want to skip over this next bit.)
At Columbia, I had my first beer.
By Thanksgiving of that year, I had lost my virginity to a Philosophy major. A woman.
Columbia College was a small part of Columbia University and was all-male until my senior year.
My girlfriend went to Barnard across Broadway - an all-female college also within the University.
My girlfriend had a roommate who also had a boyfriend and the four of us basically lived together in their dorm room all year at Barnard.
I have no idea how I and my girlfriend’s roommate’s boyfriend got past Barnard security every day, but we clearly did.
The four of us also had a friend named Peter who had graduated some years before.
He had been living ever since then, secretly, in the basement of one of the campus theatre spaces.
Peter was a director - all of us had gotten to know each other working on a production of an Agatha Christie play that Peter directed that fall in the lobby of one of the dorms.
After that, Peter started sleeping on the floor at the foot of our beds after a mysterious evening of cruising and partying.
He’d creep in during the night and we’d wake up in the morning to find him snoring on the floor.
Peter was a complete mess.
He was basically a drug addicted, sex addicted, homeless person who couldn’t move past his college years into the real world.
We worshiped him.
Peter got us all high one night and I decided that I should try all of the drugs so that I could better understand what they did.
So, Peter, became my Professor of Illicit Substances.
Every weekend, we would try something new.
Peter would explain what each one would do, what the dangers were and how to take them.
And then we’d dive in.
From what I remember over that semester, we at least got through cocaine, mushrooms and LSD.
I refused to try heroin or anything else that needed injecting.
I never really did anything more than once.
Cocaine honestly didn’t do much of anything for me.
Mushrooms were hilarious and the LSD was amazing.
The LSD was so amazing (we went to see THE EXORCIST on campus, and I wept with laughter all the way through) that I knew I should never do it again.
The rest of my years at school saw me volunteering at an Off-Broadway theatre downtown that soon led to me getting paid and began my entire career.
I spent my junior year at school in London which began a life-long love affair with that city.
On our semester breaks, we traveled - we skied in Switzerland, had a Seder in Rome, visited Dachau, and got drunk on retsina on a Greek Island.
I slept with guys.
Peter became the first person I knew who died from AIDS.
By the time I finally graduated from Columbia I felt ready to live in New York.
Yes, OK, I also went to classes. Well, most of them. A lot of them.
Some were fantastic and some utterly forgettable.
My point with all of that (and that was a lot of information - maybe too much. Sorry Mom.)
is that College was far more than classes.
Last night, LeBron James created a virtual graduation for the Class of 2020.
It was very inspiring.
Some of the most popular performers and personalities in the country participated.
President Obama delivered the Commencement Address and it was spectacular.
He gave the Class of 2020 three pieces of advice.
Don’t be afraid.
Do what you think is right.
Build a community.
We watched, and were moved, but what did the Class of 2020 think?
We have a niece who is graduating this year who didn’t even know it was happening until we told her.
I’m not sure whether she finally actually watched or not.
Did she have the same experience watching a compassionate, articulate and intelligent leader offer hope for the future that we did?
I am sure she didn’t.
What will college look like for her?
She already knows that her classes will be virtual this fall.
She will be studying from home with her parents.
Yes, she will get the information from her classes that she needs to know.
For her and for kids her age, getting information virtually is a completely different experience than it would be for those of us of a certain age.
She grew up with the internet.
It has been a normal and expected part of her life since before she can remember.
I don’t think that anyone in the Class of 2020 will have a real problem in their online classes this year.
Where the problem is going to be, I think, is in the life lessons they going to learn.
None of them are going to be able to make the incredibly stupid mistakes and take the incredibly stupid risks that we all did when we were that age.
I don’t want to suggest that anything I did in college should be imitated in any way.
That was my journey.
How will these kids - young adults now - mess up and learn from it?
I am a firm believer in education.
Education, however, has to go beyond the walls of the classroom.
We already have an entire generation of kids that seem more clued in to each other on their phones than they appear to be with each other in person.
What is this year going to change for them?
As we, who have had many experiences throughout our lives, go through this, we have some ability to put this into some perspective.
What does all of this look like to people who haven’t been on the planet as long as we have?
As we all think about going back, the graduating class of 2020 is thinking about starting out.
COVID-19 might be a sometimes, terrifying pause for us, but it will likely to be the defining moment at the beginning of this next generation’s lives that will inform everything that follows for them.
Today is my husband Michael’s birthday.
Of all the people on the planet that I could be stuck with during this crisis, I can’t imagine a better companion to get through it with.
After an endless series of successes and mistakes and triumphs and wrong turns in my life, I’ve learned enough to be able to recognize something good when I have it.
And I have it.
Now, all I have to do is not to screw it up.
Hopefully I have learned my lessons well enough to not screw it up TOO badly.
I am so grateful for all of those lessons.
May the lessons that the Class of 2020 are learning, different though they may be, serve them just as well.
Congratulations to my niece and to the entire Class of 2020 - here and all around the world.
Don’t be afraid.
Do what you think is right.
Build a community.
And happy birthday, my love.