Tuesday, July 31, 2018

Transition


For me the 1990’s was a time of transition.
Teaching at a college there is always change as new students come while others graduate and the staff changes, maybe a bit slower, but still always seems in flux.
With my return from Connecticut in the fall of 1994 the world itself was changing a bit faster than it had in recent years big changes were about to happen but I could not see them at the time.
Computers had been around for a while and we were slowly using them more and more each year and with the coming of Windows 95 and the growth of the internet we would became more reliant on technology more and more in the years ahead.
I will comment more about computers as they were integrated a little more each year to productions and daily lives.


Maybe it was because I was getting older, all of thirty-eight in 1994, but I saw the world and what was happening through a different, perhaps a more mature, perspective.
x



In the summer of 1993 I went to my last Grateful Dead concert in Buffalo with tens of thousands of fans at the old Rich Stadium.
Just a side note, the three women I went to the concert with had all been to Woodstock as young teenagers, I did not go.
In the fall of 1994 I saw the Barenaked Ladies in the college ballroom with just a few hundred people.
I was just a few rows from the stage during the “If I had a $1,000,000” song and got to see the boxes of Mac and Cheese flying towards the stage along with clouds of cheese mix in the air.
They returned a year later and played to a sell-out crowd of several thousand in the gym.

Music, people, technology and the whole world around us is always changing but it is hard to see it as it is happening.
Time and distance, the magic of hindsight, gives of different, maybe clearer,  view of what we have lived through.

The first play of the 1994-5 season was The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams with an outside guest director.
I did not know it at the time but this was going to be the last production with the full design and production team that had created some outstanding productions over the past five years.

There were still many more wonderful plays to work on and some very talented students to mentor, but I felt obliged to mark this time as special.

More adventures ahead.



* * *

No comments:

Post a Comment