End of the Semester

Yesterday I taught my last classes of the semester. It was a comprehensive review prior to the final exam, and as I went down the list I’d prepared, I thought, my gosh, it’s been so long. The last time I had to worry about a fall semester final was nearly two decades ago. Now I get to be the one making the students worry. There were the usual moans and groans about the material, and everyone seems to want to know exactly what’s going to be on the exam. You want to tell them, but you want them to learn to study at the same time.

I taught The Piano Lesson by August Wilson for the drama component, which I’d chosen mostly because the play was written so recently, not because of race. But it worked out as a good counterpoint to current events in the country, and we even had a racial epithet scrawled on the pavement outside the Arts and Letters building the morning after the election. In my class we discussed (briefly) the N-word as used by the playwright and by the characters in the play. Niagara University is an extremely white, upper-class environment—I shouldn’t have been surprised, really—and though there are non-white students, there aren’t many. The school has nothing like the diversity of the schools in Buffalo proper and it should go without saying that my alma mater, Berkeley, is one of the most diverse schools in the country—so diverse that when I attended there was a kind of competition between ethnic populations to claim Most Marginalized and therefore Most Disenfranchised. (The Filipinos lead by vocal rather than other means, as I recall.) I had two African-American students in my first class, and when we discussed some of the themes and issues involved in the play, the silence and tension were the second-most palpable of the semester. (The classroom was mortuary-quiet for the lecture that covered Queer Theory.)

In my research for The Piano Lesson I was thrilled to discover that the Underground Railroad routes to Canada dropped right through the campus and down into the lower Niagara River gorge. I was able to point right out the window and say, There. There is where history happened.

I found myself suddenly plunged back into the ballet world this week. My brother’s school is doing their annual Nutcracker, and as a favor to family I offered to play one of the extras in the party scene.

Being back just for this small part reminds me that I haven’t missed being in the world that is their professional life. I worked hard to get out of one industry (hospitality) and in a rather short period of time have been welcomed into the one I’ve wanted to be in for so long, writing and teaching. Doing the work I did for them last year was something I did willingly, even gratefully, because they mean a lot to me and have done so much for me in the last couple years. As I came up the stairs into their second-floor studio, the smell of peanut-oil and rice flour wafting up from the Chinese restaurant at street level, and was inundated by the energy that is a Nutcracker rehearsal the week before it opens, I realized that I had truly made my own life here, that the business of the ballet school now means something different to me than it did a year ago.