This is addressed to my middle and high school chorus/drama teacher, who singlehandedly inoculated my life with the theatre bug. I wrote this letter for a surprise online retirement party held in her honor.
Dear Mrs. Warren,
You have undoubtedly impacted my life, and for that I will never be able to thank you enough. But I’m sure you get that all the time.
Right now, I’m speaking from Providence, Rhode Island where I’m two thirds of the way though my masters degree in theatre directing from Brown University and Trinity Rep. I moved here after twelve years directing, clowning, puppeteering, teaching, and producing theatre in Chicago. I moved there after seven years of singing and acting in Briarcliff Manor.
Twenty-one of the thirty-one years I have been alive have been spent doggedly pursuing something that is unreasonable, inconvenient, underfunded, irrelevant, and (as we have recently learned) non-essential: live theatre. Mrs. Warren, you are to blame.
Thank you.
At every juncture in these twenty one years, I have asked myself, for all of the reasons I just listed: why the hell do I do this? And every time, for twenty-one years, the answer has been: I can’t not. The theatre is where my voice and my community live. You helped me find those two very essential things back in Briarcliff, and the theatre is what feeds them now.
Thank you.
Middle school Aileen was a lot of things—awkward, anxious, curious, stubborn—and self-possessed, she was not. Learning algebra and growing boobs at the same time is difficult enough, and then you’re also thrown into the morass of self definition? Impossible. This chubby, biracial, only child didn’t stand a chance. Until. UNTIL! Her curiosity and free time brought her to the backside of an upright piano on the stage of a freshly built auditorium. (Mrs. Warren, you were on the other side.) There, making a piano sandwich with her new favorite teacher, middle school Aileen found Her Voice.
More specifically, I found one, glorious operatic note that could resonate from my pubescent body and fill the room. I felt like I had discovered a super power and immediately committed to adding more pitches to my repertoire. Who knew that my voice could be bigger than me? You did. I don’t sing any more (though Ali convinced me to come out of retirement for this event) but that knowledge has never left me. My voice is bigger than me and it is mine to use. You taught me that.
Thank you.
When I got to high school, armed with my big voice, I did every singing and acting thing I could: the plays, the musicals, chorus, drama club, drama class, singing lessons, NYSSMA, NYSTEA, NYSSSA, All County, All State, all of the things, all in. High school Aileen was a little less awkward, but she was still a work in progress. (And remains so.) The algebra became calculus, the boobs became real, and I became a part of a team. I had been on teams before, of course, but I would say that I was “on” those teams. Singing and acting and doing stage makeup and playing zip zap zop and finding your keys, Mrs. Warren—I was a part of that team and it was thrilling.
Mrs. Warren, your musicals at Briarcliff High School were good. I’m sure many people here know what I’m talking about, but just to say it: they were really good! I think a major reason is that these shows would slice across the social ecology of the school and all kinds of people would take part. Yes, there were hopeless theatre nerds (hello) but there were athletes, musicians, geeks, skaters, class clowns, introverts, overachievers—EVERYONE. Everyone, doing something ridiculous and beautiful and impossible, focusing their passions on a common goal. Holding that vision, that complicated machinery, that drive was you, Mrs. Warren. Making a space for all of us to exceed even our own expectations, breathlessly hurtling to opening night.
That sense of possibility in community has continued to drive me, feed me, and seduce me back into to the rehearsal room. The theatre is a world that we get to make up, and yours was welcoming and rigorous. When I am directing now, I channel those same values.
Thank you.
Congratulations, Mrs. Warren, on your retirement. You have made an indelible mark on the lives of your students, their voices, and the values they bring to their communities long after graduating. This was truly essential work.
With love and gratitude,
Aileen McGroddy
