Remarks to Biloxi Senior High School Class of 1976 at Their 40-Year Reunion June 11, 2016
Written, Delivered and Copyright 2016 Daniel W. Skelton
I want to start by repeating a story my late father once told when he was asked to speak before a meeting. He quoted a child’s essay about the philosopher Socrates, in its entirety. It read:
“Socrates lived in ancient Greece. He talked a lot. They poisoned him.” I’ll try to keep that in mind.
Ten years ago, the reunion committee asked me to speak Saturday night. At the conclusion, I promised that if they asked me to do it again, I’d just read the same speech every ten years until Alzheimer’s set in and even I thought it was new material, so I dusted it off to see how close I could come to doing just that.
(Pick up speech from 2006, flip through pages)
Shaquille O’Neal reference. That’s a little dated. Tiger Woods. I dunno, the last decade hasn’t been too kind to Tiger.
Okay, this one always gets a big laugh: usual joke about how the New Orleans Saints will never win a Super Bowl. Oh, wait…
(Disgustedly throw papers on table)
Well, those plans went out the window!
Okay, so it needs to be updated. To make good on my warning, I will repeat some of what I said ten years ago. If you’ve already heard those stories, feel free to “pity laugh.” Since I’ve spent my career in computers, consider this Reunion Speech Version 2.0. Or if you’re a Microsoft user, Version 10.
So over forty years and a couple hundred pounds ago…
I stood in front of this class on graduation night and said some stuff. What I remembered most about that speech is the PA system at Lee Street Stadium had a really long delay on it…
Quick aside to the guests, Lee Street Stadium, now renamed “Yankie Stadium,” was where we played our football games and where graduation was held. Try to drive by it over the weekend. Yeah, “drive by” is the right term for it. Keep your hands and feet inside the vehicle at all times.
Anyway, there was a really long delay before the PA system played back what you said, and the natural tendency was to try and slow down your speech to let the playback catch up with your lips, and as you did this you sounded increasingly drunk. Anyway, my apologies to my classmates: my focus that evening was not to inspire or enlighten. I just didn’t want to sound drunk in front of my grandparents.
Now the day after our 2006 reunion, where I made a big deal about how my class oration was sadly lost to the ashes of history, my Dad said to me, “No it isn’t. I kept a copy.” I had mixed emotions. I immediately knew I would have to revise my remarks at the 40-year reunion, because saying it was lost would be what they call “a lie.” I don’t lie so easily. I mean, it’s not like I’m running for President.
So I read it for the first time in 30 years. Here’s the Reader’s Digest version:
“Blah, blah, blah. Obligatory pretentious quotation. Blah, blah, blah, blah. Gratuitous second pretentious quotation. Yada, yada, yada.” I was horrified. What I just said was more articulate than the actual speech.
As I had remembered, the theme of my speech was that the journey was more important than the goal, that our years together in school were more important than the single event of graduation. I will always believe that.
A couple of months after graduation, this woman walks up to me and says that my words that night inspired her to rethink a decision she had made, and because of my sober-sounding speech, she decided not to abandon the work she loved — breeding dogs. So the end result of all of my carefully chosen words is that today, there are a few more sons of bitches in the world. Still the single most effective speech I’ve ever given.
Whenever I’m asked to speak in public, I always flash back to graduation night and my first thought is: I really hope the PA system doesn’t have a delay.
When I was asked to speak at tonight’s event, I wanted to find some perspective for these remarks. Last time, I talked about my son entering high school, wondering how his experience would differ from mine, but now he’s not only graduated high school, he has his master’s degree, so that comparison has been, as they say, “overcome by events.” And that’s really the point. Our perspective constantly shifts as events change us.
We find ourselves now at that stage in life where most of us have said goodbye to our grandparents and parents, and some of the luckiest of us have begun to welcome grandchildren into the world.
Yes, we are in the process of becoming the old farts. And that transition makes me think about all that our parents gave to us. But consider this: those stories they told us about growing up in the Depression and hearing about Pearl Harbor on the radio? They were closer in time to the actual events than we are now when we tell our kids about Watergate and the Bicentennial. When we were born, the atomic bomb at Hiroshima was more recent than the events of 9-11 are today.
But what stories we have to tell!
We can tell our kids and grandkids how, when we were children, all the known planets were just fuzzy blobs, even on the best telescopes, and now we’ve seen them all up close in incredible detail. How when we were young we knew that Saturn had rings, but didn’t know that Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune had them too.
We can tell them how we looked up in the sky at the Moon and knew that men were walking on its surface at that very moment. Then we can try to explain to them why we’ve never gone back.
We can tell them what it was like to watch the first Super Bowl, before it was even called the “Super Bowl.” To see Lombardi win the trophy before it was named for him.
We can tell them about what it was like to be the first kids to have “Hot Wheels,” “GI Joes,” or “Easy Bake Ovens” under the Christmas tree; to spray the first cans of a strange substance called “Silly String”; to throw a ball at our kid brother’s head as hard as we could, but it was safe because it was made of something new called “Nerf”; to bounce a “Super Ball” and try to hit the ceiling; to play interesting new games called “Barrel of Monkeys,” “Battleship,” and “Mystery Date.”
Well, I didn’t play “Mystery Date.” Not twice, anyway.
We can tell them what it was like to have a handful of channels on the TV and if we missed a show, having to wait half a year to see something called a “re-run.”
We didn’t even have a remote control for the TV, and now I have a stack of them for all my devices. Actually, I should clarify that. My brother and I were my Dad’s remote control.
We can tell them about our music. But maybe we shouldn’t tell them about all of it.
Over the decades, I gradually gathered the music of our high school era. Just this year, I completed that collection. I now have every song that hit the top 40 from the week we entered high school to the week we graduated. I listened to a lot of it putting together the songs for last night, and some of it was godawful. I mean, the kind of stuff you’re embarrassed to play for your kids and say “This is what radio sounded like when I was in school.”
I think some of it can be attributed to payola to the radio stations. I mean, how else can you explain Leo Sayer?
To remind you of some of the chart-topping songs from our distant youth, let me quote some of the more memorable lines:
From C. W. McCall: “Pig Pen, this here’s the Rubber Duck, we’re about to put the hammer down. 10-4.”
From Ray Stevens: “Oh, yes. They call him The Streak. Boogity. Boogity.”
Of course, Blue Swede gave us: “Ooga-chaka. Ooga, ooga, ooga-chaka.”
Sometimes we sing our kids and grandkids to sleep with those gentle songs from our high school years.
(Pantomime rocking a baby, singing)
“Skyrockets in flight – afternoon delight…”
Remember how our parents were terrified of Kiss, with their bizarre makeup and monster platform shoes, spitting blood and belching fire? Well, Kiss took off their makeup and we saw that they were about as boring-looking as we all expected, and then they transformed from hard working band to reality show stars with a merchandising empire.
I’d still put them all up against today’s best. Olivia Newton-John and Linda Ronstadt totally out-class Miley Cyrus and Katy Perry. Kanye may think he’s a genius but he doesn’t hold a candle to Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, or Maurice White. And don’t get me started on Justin Bieber.
Every time I added a song to the collection, I thanked the Lord for making me old enough that I finished high school before rap music.
I was at a friend’s house recently, and we were watching “Music Choice” on cable, tuned to a “classic rock” channel playing some of the better songs from our era: Queen, Rolling Stones, Fleetwood Mac. Then I noticed that they were displaying ads onscreen during the songs, for grown-up things like luxury cars and vacation packages and … Metamucil? Then they started running ads for Cialis and Viagra. I turned it off the first time they put up an ad for Depends.
We will tell our kids and grandkids about so much more: lines around the block for gasoline, with the price approaching an unthinkable dollar per gallon. About the wall that separated two halves of the city of Berlin and the wonderful day it came down. About when an American President was forced to resign by the pressure of public opinion, and how during the turmoil of regime change, the only armed forces on the streets of the capitol were cops directing traffic.
We can tell them about beautiful twin skyscrapers at the south of Manhattan and the terrible day that changed everything when evil brought them down.
9-11. That’s a day when something I’d dreaded all my life came to pass, a terrorist attack on American soil.
You know another time when I felt that way? When I heard killer bees had finally reached America. When we were in high school, they were a bad Saturday Night Live skit, almost an urban legend, right up there with UFOs in Pascagoula. They were heading toward the Panama Canal. Could they cross it? They might reach the Southwest and start stinging whole cities to death sometime by the turn of the Millenium – we didn’t call it Y2K yet. That seemed so far in the future we didn’t need to worry about it. Now they’re here, just less deadly than the doomsayers led us to believe.
One thing I definitely have told my son is that you make the best friends of your life in high school because these people know you before the rest of the world changes you into … someone you didn’t expect to become. In their eyes you will forever be young with a whole world of possibilities ahead of you. These people saw you at your best and they will always remember you at your best, even if you don’t.
And there is one other big thing I know we will recount to our children’s children.
We’ll tell them about Hurricane Camille washing away so much of this city and how we had to attend classes on Saturday mornings to make up for missed school days, then, years later, Katrina doing even worse and how our families were uprooted from our homes for months, some of us permanently.
But then we can tell them about how, both times, the city of Biloxi rose from the floodwaters to be bigger and more prosperous than it was before the storm, and, please God, never give them such a story of their own to tell.
I guess I should end there, just as I did in Version 1.0 of this speech, ten years ago. Those two storms, markers in time for our childhood and adult lives, really are the two events that will forever define this city and this region.
So again, I warn you: if I make it to the 50th and you ask me to do this again, I won’t stray far from this source material. Especially now that I found my old class oration and the Saints have finally won that Super Bowl.
Thank you, and I hope that it’s safe for me to consume my goblet of wine without needing to use a taster.
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