The Kiss

Bother. The High School adjacent to my neighborhood, the one my kids will attend when they "come of age", has "come of age" in its own rite.

I'm guessing, that the drama teacher at Stone Bridge High School in Ashburn, VA is a liberal. This is just a guess and it's not at all surprising. My wife and I are thespians (but right-leaning thespians). In my experience, our political leanings are in the minority among the "theater" crowd. And that's just fine.

We have many high school age students that we know who attend the school and who are also in drama. They have invited us to many of their productions. I've come to the conclusion that their productions bite.

Rather, the productions at SB High School are poorly done. In many cases the productions are also wholly inappropriate for these teenagers.

Two years ago they performed "Grease". Unlike the movie, the musical is a bit more explicit about teenage pregnancy and pre-marital sex. As an educational establishment you have some leeway to modify some things and leave other things out. They kept it all in.

This last year they performed "Kiss Me Kate." I'm rather fond of Cole Porter, but anyone will agree that his lyrics are a bit saucy.

Take for instance this great line from the two gangsters in the song "Brush Up Your Shakespeare":

If your goil is a Washington Heights dream
Treat the kid to "A Midsummer Night's Dream"
If she then wants an all-by-herself night
Let her rest ev'ry 'leventh or "Twelfth Night"

If because of your heat she gets huffy
Simply play on and "Lay on, Macduffy!"
Brush up your Shakespeare

You get the point.

Here's the short of it. The edgey liberal drama teacher assigned the kids to write their own one-act plays to perform for the school. As I understand it the teacher only reviewed the plays the day before the performance.

Here's a video segment that ran on the local Fox News channel:
click here.

So, a few students put together a show about a gay football player and then a kiss (not a real kiss) at the end.

OK, so you can see the where this is going. After much fussing on our community bulletin board I posted the following, which sums up my thoughts on the matter:

I think anyone who sees the video from the newscast can conclude for
themselves whether it was a "real" kiss or not. I suppose that if
they had "simulated" sex on stage (using a "Hollywood movie trick") we
would let it pass? Let me be clear, I don't mean to equate the two.
The kiss was the culmination of a one-act play that contains (as I
understand it) mature content and situations. The question is: should
the school have allowed the one-act to go on considering the sensitive
nature of its content and the edgy ending.

Mindy is correct, we did stray from the key topic at hand. I
apologize if our tangent (defending and debunking studies etc...)
muddied the issue. So I will restate my case.

1) Parents have the right and schools the obligation to ensure a safe
learning environment for the students
2) Parents have the right and schools the obligation to ensure that
appropriate content is presented to the students
3) The recent incident of the one-act play "Offsides" that deals with
homosexual teenagers and ends in a homosexual kiss (simulated or
otherwise) distracts from the learning environment and (at the very
least) pushes the envelope of "appropriate content"
4) This is the latest in a lengthy string of edgy decisions made by
the drama department over the last 3 years

The only thing that remains to be answered: should this topic be
covered in high school in this manner (a student written play with
little outside direction presented at a school sponsored forum) or
dealt with in a different way (a series of forums for example).

This is not about bigotry but about appropriatness.

Justin