I’m always amazed to see kindergarten, middle school, and all other kinds of milestone graduation ceremonies. This never occurred to us when we were kids. We moved straight from grade to high school.
Our grade school was grades 1 to 8, and when grade 8 was finished, there was no ceremony. For us there were only religious-oriented events, such as First Communion and Confirmation. Reaching eighth grade just meant the nuns hadn’t killed us. One day we stopped going to St. Mary’s, and the next fall, we started attending York Catholic.
This did make high school graduation a bigger deal. We rehearsed for days, and made a big splash singing “To Dream the Impossible Dream,” a memory which decades later inspired me to direct Man of La Mancha.
However, that experience did not inspire me to attend any of the graduations for my three degrees. At the end of my BA at Temple I didn’t have any finals, so I would have had to stick around an extra week and that didn’t seem practical or enjoyable.
For my MA, I was hoping to just get away from OSU as soon as possible and didn’t bother with that.
I would have liked to go to my Berkeley graduation—preferably to stick my diploma in the face of the faculty member who told me I would never graduate. By then, however, we were so in debt that it was really not practical to travel from PA to CA for that.
I did start attending graduation ceremonies as a faculty member. For awhile I borrowed regalia but eventual bought a custom set. However, now that I no longer have graduating students, attending graduations is unnecessary—luckily, since I seem to be off the mailing list and am not being invited)—so I’m back to where I was before.
MUSOFYR 