This weekend we celebrated The Circle School’s 20th Anniversary. We had a big potluck on Friday, and then yesterday was the big event, with an Open House, guest speakers flown in from Massachusetts, a fabulous talent show, and a spectacular dinner for 150 current and past students and their families, as well as friends of the school. I chaired the committee responsible for the weekend, and planning of the celebration has consumed my life for the last few weeks, which is why I haven’t updated recently. It went better than I had ever dreamed it could, but the best part, for me, was dancing under the tent after the public had left and we could relax.
I am grateful for The Circle School’s existence in a way that I cannot ever hope to express. It is an inextricable part of me, of my family, of everything I will ever be. But one of the things that I wanted during my high school years was just to be a normal teenager, as do, I think, many long time TCS students. We *want* all that stupid adolescent drama and the crushes and the falling in love and the school dances celebrating that adolescence. Especially, we want to celebrate the end of all that stupid glorious shit with the very specific event known as PROM.
In planning this event, Johanna kept talking about dancing after dinner and I scoffed and said it would never happen, that TCS people just don’t dance, that we would never get that prom we had always hoped for, even tried to have during my final year at TCS, but never did. I mean, how do you have that kind of event at a school where not only are all ages treated equally, but also where the the lines between students, staff, and parents are often blurred? How do you have that event when some years there is, as there was in my final year, only one graduate? It’s something we’ve all wrestled with, and we’ve never come up with an answer.
I graduated from The Circle School six years ago, though it feels like only a few months since I left. I guess there are parts of me that never let go of that desire for a prom, even though I have left the rest of adolscence long behind. While we were dancing our hearts out last night, Johanna turned to me and said simply, “The prom we never had.” And it was. It was our celebration, the end of The Circle School’s adolescence, in true TCS fashion, with students, staff, and parents all joyfully bouncing to amazingly fun music.
Of course it was even sweeter because of the success of the other events of the day, because it was the first time in weeks that I felt truly able to relax, and because the people who stayed until the end are the ones who have been, and always will be, my family. Of all the things The Circle School has given me, the community is what I cherish most.
But a couple hours of dancing in the pouring rain until my feet hurt so much I can barely walk is pretty good too.