It was a job, many jobs in fact, well done.
Last week students from 14 schools in the Vista region were in Trinity for the regional high school drama festival.
For weeks they had been rehearsing their lines, practicing their routines and fine-tuning their performances.
For some of them it was their first time on stage, in a real theatre, in front of a live audience.
There were only so many awards to go around, but they are all deserving of praise.
And it was easy to tell that the teenagers who took to the stage at the Rising Tide Theatre in Trinity came away with an experience to remember.
The event went off so smoothly, it was hard to imagine all the work that went into providing this live theatre experience for the actors and their audiences.
Have no doubt, however, that the success of such an event required a lot of hard work behind the scenes.
And a great deal of credit for that goes to the teachers who worked with the high school drama groups to get them ready for opening night.
It is a fact that teachers are, too often, the victims of envy. Many think they have a pretty good job, what with those summers, Easter and Christmas holidays off, and (so the public perception goes) a workday that begins at 9 a.m. and ends at 3 p.m.).
Public perception, however, is wrong.
And the teachers who decided to devote their time to drama are a good example to prove those notions wrong.
Behind the scenes, leading up to last week’s drama festival, the teacher/directors poured over plays, adjusted scripts to suit the local audience or, in some cases, wrote their own play. They did not do this during school hours, you can be assured.
They held meetings with the drama club, assigned acting roles and supporting roles to every student that showed up — ensuring no one was left out of the production — and then coached them through hours and hours of practice, most of it after school.
Many of the teachers who brought their students to Trinity gave up hours of their Easter break to ensure the group was well-prepared for the final production and to iron out all the last-minute glitches that usually crop up during the festival.
And each one of them spent pretty well all their waking hours the week of the festival, coaching students through their rehearsal, traveling with them to Trinity for each night of the festival to enable them to learn all they could about drama and to have a full theatre experience.
The only thing missing at this week’s festival, when each of the groups came to the stage to take their bows, was the teachers that had worked alongside them.
They should have been on that stage as well, sharing the spotlight and taking their bow for a job well done.
So this is our bouquet to them.
A round of applause, ladies and gentlemen, to the drama teachers who put their heart and soul into theatre and, because of their hard work and passion for the arts, ensure a memorable experience for drama students and the audiences that came to Trinity last week and were treated to some fine entertainment.
Bravo! Bravo!
Barbara Dean-Simmons
