Only One Fight

It's a record.  The two Polar Opposites, whose wedding anniversaries are noteworthy for either being cancelled by arguments or to some degree marred by them, can report only one sour note brought on by my favorite soapbox issue, public nudity.  Because I have to pay bills and unpack from our wonderful four day getaway, clean up the mess left by three 20-somethings and grocery shop, here's my best pik on the 'fore mentioned issue, just found on D#2's desktop while I was (why were you doing this??) organizing her folders... (i was unloading stuff off of a flashdrive.  Oh yeah.)  P.S... the fight wasn't because we disagreed on the issue of public nudity, just about what to DO about it.  It is ever and always about what to DO about something... God bless my DH. He does what every man who's ever confessed everything has done: puts his head down and goes on with his life.

Me? I write a letter.  This one's from six years ago, & I thot it worth a re-read.

Mr. - - - - - , Principal

Milliken High School

2800 Snowden Ave

Long Beach, CA 90808

November 23, 2004

Dear Mr. - - - - -,

I hope you will receive this letter in the spirit with which it is sent.  I just want to register disappointment at the judgment used in allowing your fall drama presentation, Noises Off,  to feature public undress.

I have long stopped being alarmed at the base elements of our culture.  Ever since I heard some guy on the radio refer to the United States as a Post Christian Culture, my alarm at what I see every day has melted to a sort of sustained grief.  I’ve grown used to looking the other way when Carl’s Junior & Victoria's Secret sell their wares, or when titillating shows like Desperate Housewives and NYPD Blue become award winning hits. [note to blog: we no longer own a TV]

I must object, however, when the values that drive commercial interests in our popular media become the standard adopted by the best of our cultural institutions; and shouldn’t our local schools strive to be that? To be the BEST of what our culture offers, willing to overcome the swill that 'popular' culture swims in?  So, this is the spirit in which I write this letter: kids need the adults in their lives to teach and model the necessary refusal to adopt the base standards they see everyday; to resist mediocrity, compromise and failure; to absorb higher principles -- the ones that even allow those money driven interests to exist in the first place: values of decency, restraint, purity, honesty, discipline.  Consult any primary source document on the founding of our free-enterprise-sustaining nation, and you will see these conservative values embedded within the framework of our founders’ writings and in the fiber of their lives.

So, what is to be gained (bawdy humor and ambitious acting skills aside) by extending to your young high school students the permission to adopt the standards of Madonna and Playtex, MTV and Hanes, when the better part of maturity calls on all of us to forsake their prurient appeals and to resist the normalization of publicly exposed underwear and recreational sex?

I cannot fathom how an institution committed to the welfare of our children and the training of future leaders could have allowed two female students (lead actor and her understudy) to strut and slink about the Milliken High School Auditorium stage in their underwear even for a minute, and certainly not for the majority of the play’s duration…

It saddens me, even sickens me.  And worst of all, one actress attends my church.  How abhorrent to think that her own school would ask her to choose between faculty approval and the better part of judgment.

Sincerely,  


[my utterly disrespected --both then and now-- name]