 AUGUST 20 • 2020 | 5

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Jewfro
All the World’s a Cafetorium
M

aybe you’
re like me 
and you’
ve got a 
short stack of tickets, 
whose perforated edges are 
perfectly intact, whose dates 
have passed and whose stages 
remain dark.
Swan Lake 
at the Opera 
House. Wu-Tang 
Clan x DSO. 
Shakespeare in 
Love.
Maybe you’
re 
like me and 
you’
ve got a child heading to a 
new school, whose principal is 
emailing, whose bike racks are 
beckoning and whose doors 
will remain closed for the 
foreseeable future.
Maybe like me, you’
re 
finding connections between 
the disparate things around 
you in lieu of our perennial 
practice of populating fall 
calendars during the dog 
days of summer when you’
d 
be better off getting dragged 
behind a motorboat.
The sets and costumes are 
all cued up for Shakespeare 
in Love, the Bloomfield Hills 
High School stage production, 
directed by Mary Bogrette. 
Mary first welcomed me into 
her middle school cafetorium 
over 25 years ago, which I’
m 
told is the statute of limitations 
for addressing teachers by their 
last names.
It’
s hard to believe I was 
that awkward kid from the 
wrong side of the tracks 
inspired to unlock raw talent 
by an idealistic young teacher. 
Hard to believe because of the 
notable absence of talent or 
tracks, though not for lack of 
awkwardness or inspiration or 
locks. 

Mary’
s engagement 
and encouragement 
made an indelible 
impression on me. 
The confidence and 
composure I developed 
have long outlasted the 
VHS copy of me singing 
You Can’
t Take That Away 
from Me in a key (keys?) 
that would have made the 
Gershwins grit their teeth 
— each other’
s teeth.
Or maybe I was 
objectively every bit as 
amazing as my mom 
said. 
In any case, my son is 
heading to sixth grade, Mary is 
starting her 30th year teaching 
(third in high school) and the 
only local performances we’
ve 
been treated to lately are the 
melodramatic monologues of 
anti-maskers.
What’
s it like teaching 
theater far from the theater? 
Hard, according to Mary, but 
worth it. Different degree of 
difficulty, but as worth it as 
ever.
Last spring, some students 
zoomed to Zoom and flipped 
for Flipgrid. Others opted for 
online office hours. Then there 
were those who went incognito 
until some Instagram 
investigating turned them up.
With Shakespeare in limbo, 
furloughed professionals from 
the West Coast to the West 
End volunteered to work 
remotely with high school 
drama students. 
“Theater people of the 
world united.” Good thing, 
considering Bloomfield 
Schools recently made the 
“unanticipated” decision to 
start the year remotely, with 
“robust plans developed for 

in-person, distance, and virtual 
teaching and learning.”
For Mary, robust includes 
Acting, Acting 2, Acting 
3 — “script analysis, design 
considerations, construction 
of a set, designing and 
creating costumes and make-
up, directing and rehearsal 
of a play, all of the technical 
considerations (lights, sound, 
special effects) of theater 
production, performance for 
a panel of evaluators (theater 
professionals and university 
professors) and performance 
for peer audiences” — 
musical theater and theater 
production courses, with a new 
International Baccalaureate 
Diploma Programme (so 
spelled), not to mention 
the eventual extracurricular 
productions of Music Man and 
Into the Woods ...
Friends, we’
ve got trouble
Right here in Detroit City
Trouble with a capital “T”
And that rhymes with “C”
And that stands for COVID.
Into the woods, indeed. For 
all the severe summertime 
semantics about the “essential” 

nature of teachers, this 
virus was bound to spread 
unimpeded through our 
threadbare social safety 
net. Symptoms may include 
congested unemployment 
insurance, emaciated wage 
growth, shortness of parental 
leave, sniffling childcare, 
swollen prescription prices 
and, let’
s say, diarrhea of public 
revenue for failure to properly 
tax capital gains. 
It doesn’
t take a pandemic 
to create anxiety this time of 
year for even the most august 
educators. They’
ve been on the 
front lines this whole time.
School districts, for their 
part, should remove every 
other desk and keep them 
gone to rein in class sizes; 
postpone further standardized 
testing until we determine the 
final digit of Pi; quit trying to 
teach 16-year-olds to derive 
at 7:30 in the morning; and 
cease contracting for lunches 
with companies that specialize 
in feeding prisoners poorly 
profitably.
Bit dramatic? You know who 
to blame. 

Ben Falik

The BHHS production of Clue

GEORGIA ZIMMERMAN

