There’s always that poor kid whose last name starts with Z. Or, as happened in my daughters class 3 girls, unrelated with the same name. It’s true. In a small school, no less. Unimaginative Mothers naming their kids that month, I guess.
My daughter’s confirmation is today.
Mass at 4pm.
Outside temperature: 99-degrees.
Take a guess what modern amenity this church lacks?
At the graduation of my older nephew there were two classmates, cousins, who had nobody to clap for them. See, they had lots of relatives but they were all outside the venue, picketing the school and everyone else, telling us we were going to hell.
Yep, both were Phelps kids, granchildren to ol’ Phred himself, part of the WBC. They had to have been so emabrrassed.
I guess I am an outlier in this group. I never graduated High School so that was not an option for me. I did not attend my own graduations for Community College, University, or Graduate degrees. However, I did attend all the ceremonies for my nieces and nephews. And yet, every year I watch the ceremony for the local university on the university channel. I’ve got it on my schedule for the Saturday after next.
I didn’t graduate HS (long story) but when I graduated from nursing school, I only made my (then) husband attend my actual graduation. I was able to give away 3 tickets to classmates. My class had a private Pinning ceremony to which we invited our family and friends. That one meant so much more to me.
At my daughter’s college graduation, the family cut out as soon as she crossed the stage and got the party started! Our grad came home to a party in full swing.
“Doonesbury” addressed this today. Enjoy!
Around here, we have e ceremony called Baccalaureate for high school graduates. Religious ceremony that is all a bunch of tedious hymn, more speeches and a sermon to boot. It was bad enough when I was a graduate but my dad was a teacher and we sometimes had to go with him for school stuff. Going to this crap when you know the people is bad going when you don’t know anyone is the worst.
The Onion comes through again:
Hotshot Commencement Speaker Jumps Straight Into Speech Without Even Defining ‘Courage’
mmm
My wife’s sister and brother-in-law got back from a year in Afghanistan.
It was the first we saw them and they sat down in front of us, not with us.
Eight people spoke. It included things like a person from a local representative’s office. Who cared?!
(Number six was great though, because of his speech:
“Thank you for serving. I’m sure you want to go home, so goodbye.”)
Oh yeah, that’s what I attended. So not all Catholic weddings are that bad? Good to know. That was bad enough that I was tempted to decline any future invitations to Catholic weddings on principle.
That’s pretty typical. Most Catholic weddings are a full Mass, with the Wedding included during it.
One of my cousins was married by an old, strict priest – in that case, he stopped the ceremony after they had finished their vows so that the couple could sign the marriage document, and the best man and maid of honor could sign as witnesses, right there on the altar! Only after that could we finish the Mass, and go off to the wedding reception.
Decades ago I attended my sister’s graduation ceremony in Denver. She was the only girl in the family of my generation and the first girl in the family to get a degree – largely because the rest of the family stayed in Japan and women in Japan are not encouraged to go to college to actually get degrees…
But I digress.
My sister graduated from the school of business with a specialization in accounting and computers and a dream to develop software for PC’s that would handle accounting spreadsheets for multi-property property-management companies. People thought she was stupid to dream of such a thing in the early 1980’s because the IBM PC just wasn’t able to do that kind of thing; you needed an IBM mainframe and COBOL for that kind of thing. So she dropped that dream and decided she wanted to be a grade school teacher and work with special education/special needs…
But I digress.
My sister’s ceremony was held on one end of the university’s football field with a few dozen parents and relatives and a graduating class of about sixty students – minus one who had died only a week earlier in a tragic car crash. The graduating students had petitioned the ceremony organizers to let Kenney ‘graduate’ with them and somehow managed to get an okay to let any of the grads who felt such a need say a few parting words to Kenney.
Now this was Denver, high in the Rocky mountains, and it was the end of May. So it’s not like the day was sweltering at over a hundred degrees in the shade. Nevertheless, it wasn’t fun to sit in the full afternoon sun while a 2-hour ceremony was getting stretched into a 3-to-4 hour ceremony. The faculty and administrators all did their routine speeches – slightly modified with mantras like ‘keep pushing forward’ and ‘don’t let tragedies derail your achievements’ and ‘carry the memory of your loved ones forward as you succeed’ and other feeble attempts to make Kenney’s recent demise into something inspirational. Then the student speakers basically did the same. Then, as the names of each graduating person was read, said person went up on stage, received a rolled-up piece of blank paper (a symbolic diploma; the real ones were mailed) tied with a black ribbon (in honor of Kenney), shook hands and got photographed with the Dean of the Business School, and was allowed to step up to a microphone if they wanted to say something nice about Kenney or offer condolences to his family (in attendance) or thank their own parents or whatever. About 2/3rds of the students took that opportunity with speeches running from a quick, “Hey, I didn’t know you, but I heard you were really generous and cool and it’s a shame we lost you – oh, and thanks mom-and-dad for putting me through school” to lovely-but-long-winded eulogies and grand speeches about how Kenney would be remembered fondly and his spirit would live on through (the speaker’s) personal success – with a surprising number of girls saying they wished they could have dated him and several saying they were glad to have gone out with him and on and on and on and on.
And then came something of an unintended punch line.
Kenney’s younger sister came on-stage to thank everyone for praising her brother during a ceremony which should have focused on the graduates more and on the tragedy-that-was-her-brother less. The irony, she noted, was that Kenney was known as ‘smart’ to his peers on campus because he went to college a year early and he was known as ‘generous’ to his so-called friends because he was always giving away free beer and he was known as ‘funny’ to his so-called friends because he was like classic Jerry Lewis when he was drunk–which was most of the time and it was a miracle he managed to get through enough classes with enough of a GPA to graduate (but maybe that was an example of how smart he could be). But while “Uncle Ock”* knew how to handle his booze, Kenny did not – and what could you expect when you were officially too young to drink anyway? And the real tragedy was that Kenney and their cousin didn’t just crash into a telephone pole on a black-ice covered road, Kenney lost control while being fellated and, while she wasn’t going to be judgmental about anyone’s lifestyle, that was a pretty strong example of why you shouldn’t be giving alcohol to fourteen-year-old boys.
And she walked off stage% and absolutely everyone sat there silently trying to understand how the pieces of her verbal puzzle fit together#. The Dean was the first to get out of his chair, grab the microphone, and quickly say, “Congratulations again…Thank you all for attending, Have a nice day…” blah, blah, blah, drive safely…
–G!
*I was a fan of the Spider Man comics at the time and had visions of Doctor Octopus when that name was mentioned. I’m pretty sure that wasn’t who she was referring to.
%This was the mid-80s; dropping-the-mic wasn’t a thing yet.
#Or maybe they were silent because they fully understood what she said. I had never even met Kenney so I didn’t really pay much attention to the eulogies and tributes (and probably much less to the actual graduation oration). Therefore I didn’t even think about or put the pieces together until probably September or maybe the next year.
Our son graduated last year and the whole thing went very quickly. There are about 400 kids per graduating class. They parade in, their are three (or four, maybe) short speeches of less than five minutes each. The choir of Juniors sings a song. They read each name and the kids go through the line in a way that would make Ford proud. They graduate, everyone leaves.
But even for short and sweet there are problems - its held in the county hockey arena (everyone has one of those, right?), which seats about 3500 and fills up. But arena seating is really steep, and eighteen year old kids have old grandparents trying to get up and down arena steps. And, as is traditional, its usually hotter than Hades in there.
The daughter graduates next Thursday. Same damn arena.
St. Paul schools do all their high schools over one or two days in another assembly line. They have the guests from the previous class leave by the back door, while the guests from the next class come in from the main door - like Mickey’s Philharmagic at Disney.
The only interest surrounding graduations around here usually has to do with the drama that occurs afterwards when some angry curmudgeon writes a letter to the editor of the local rag complaining how some families “turn this solemn event into a circus” by cheering when their grad’s name is called. Evidently there are two schools of thought where graduation ceremonies are concerned: one camp feels they are solemn ceremonies and another camp feels they are times for celebration. IME this divide appears to fall along socio-economic lines.
I have a “spring concert” to go to at a Montessori preschool this afternoon. Got you beat.
This is a pretty hippy-dippy Montessori too, so the kids get to the stage and all jump around and go their separate ways. It’s difficult to even discern the tune that about 15% of them are actually singing. It’s like, their free expression, man. There are about 8 different classes, and each one has a few songs, so there a quite a few “scene changes.” Feral cats are more organized.
Public school would have had those little shits all standing in line and singing at the tops of their lungs in unison, like God intended.
Sending thoughts and prayers your way. Is temporarily faking death/a medical emergency feasible?
Thank you for the T&P’s! 
So, the first song they performed was The Tragically Hip’s “Boybcaygeon.” Which is a beautiful story about a fictional gay cop who responds to a race riot that actually happened in Toronto. I can now proudly say I have heard 3 year olds (poorly) sing the line
“And their voices rang
With that Aryan twang”
After that song I told my wife I was heading back to work and excused myself. Incredible. We’re paying what amounts to a decent mortgage to send our son to this school.
Nothing inherently wrong with the song at all, but to have actual 3 year olds singing it to kick off a “spring concert” was surreal.
I.V. Chemotherapy. At least I think that’s coming up. Blecch.
Now, hold on a second here. Did Kenney start drinking when he was 14, or was a 14-year-old boy in the car, for whatever reason, or what?
I was thinking the cousin, also in the car, was the 14-year-old. If Kenney started (and would have graduated) a year early, and was still underage, I assume he would have been 20?
My daughter’s high school graduation was on Friday, and while I was expecting a boring, solemn ceremony, it was fantastic!
It was held in the high school auditorium instead of outside because of the forecast. The principal gave a tiny speech welcoming everyone and concluded with, “And now, ladies and gentlemen, the Class of 2018!” The audience stood and cheered happily. The band began to play P&C, and the graduates began to enter the aud from the doors and walked down the aisles, smiling and waving, and filed onto the stage.
There were a number of short speeches, and the kids (175) were each announced, walked up for their diploma, took a photo, chatted with the principal for a sec, and sat back down. Afterwards, the principal talked some more about how proud he was, his voice broke which was funny and touching, and then the class president invited the graduates to switch their tassles, there was a bunch of cheering and clapping and a standing ovation, beach balls began bouncing around on stage, silly string was squirted and confetti was thrown, and they walked back up the aisles. I loved it.
Oh! And my daughter told me later that when the kids walked to the auditorium, their teachers, from elementary school to high school, were lining the hallway, cheering and waving and crying. I love that.