"Over the Rainbow": Fantasy Lands, Dream Worlds, and Magic Kingdoms

Rationale

One answer to the preceding question is that students’ imaginations are flexible; they transition variably in and out of their fantasies and dream worlds into where some teachers would want them: reality, as it is called. However, if “Art is the lie that makes us see the truth”, then a fictional and musical retelling of one of American history’s celebrities portrayed on the stage with a Puerto Rican actor and writer as the star belies the “Penumbra of Allusion” that any one of us could be the star of any one of our many fantasies, IF we could dream it so.

As a kid I was raised in part by Philadelphia’s stage theaters, pursuing my mom to her night work where she bustled about busily as one of Philadelphia’s few theatrical press agents, representing all seven of the professional theaters to the media and critics. All I cared about was finding an empty seat to watch each visiting production, while my father sat in the front row reviewing each production in his role as the Entertainment Editor of Philadelphia’s Inquirer newspaper. City news reports had proclaimed Philadelphia a dying city, and if you asked traditional theatergoers they would have told you that Philadelphia nightlife was, in fact, dead. From my small perch in the nearest balcony, however, I marveled at the miracle of Peter Pan’s flight to Never Neverland, became enraptured with the evolving relationship between student and teacher in The King and I’s exotic Siamese setting, or fell in love with Sandra Dee’s dancing in Grease. I joined the audience each evening, be it Al Pacino’s ferocious tirades in William Shakespeare’s Richard III, Geoffrey Holder’s contra-bass laughter as Daddy Goodness, or Richard Kiley’s sentimental singing of “To dream the impossible dream” in Don Quixote. After each play I leapt from my seat once the lights came up and raced from the enchanted world created by the actors, stage crew, and scripts to tap dance backstage between Gregory Hines and Eubie Blake following Bubbling Brown Sugar, find Yule Brynner his shirt as the dry ice evaporated from The King and I, or remove Marcel Marceau’s makeup once Bip had finished waving imaginary stories into reality. I returned home each opening night with vinyl records to help me count off the steps to A Chorus Line and lend my voice to back up Ben Vereen in The Wiz. Even sitting politely in the audience I could participate by clapping, laughing, and quietly humming along.

While my parents left their work in the theater for other enterprises, my early start remains a lesson I can share with students at my high school, so that they, too can assume the role of a lifetime by being actors, choreographers, stage crew, directors, and scriptwriters in the manufacturing their audience’s dreams. Lower Northeast Philadelphia sets the scene for my school’s playful introduction to student driven theater. Roughly 50% Puerto Rican, 25% Dominican, and 25% African American, according to the 2014-2015 school report, Thomas Alva Edison High School & John C. Fareira Skills Center may have been ranked 80th of 82 high schools within the School District of Philadelphia, and 25^th of 26 high schools within the designated “Turnaround Network”, but we have an active after school dance troupe that performs twice yearly, a robust conga group bordering upon a dozen drummers who often remain playing in the music room after the janitors have locked the main exit doors, and a dynamic poetry team that scripts, memorizes, and performs in citywide “slam” league competitions with 23 other middle and high schools every Friday evening each spring. While I coach the poetry team in the afternoons, I also teach a poetry elective during every school day enrolled with students from every age and academy across the school except the Ninth. The Poetry class is usually filled up to or beyond the 33 student legal limit but I have adequate space in my double-wide classroom, or in the auditorium of the 1300 student school. Electives like my poetry class are either 45 or 90 minutes, and the school also offers a 9^th grade Drama elective to 9^th graders only, and both of us who teach these electives have a lot of freedom in how to design our curricula.

While teachers at my school are determined to increase the rigor in our instruction, as well as improve student’s reading and writing skills in every class, the electives allow us a more flexible approach to do so. 25% of Edison HS’s students have Individual Education Plans (IEPs) so legally they need accommodations in order to fully grasp some concepts or need appropriate scaffolding in order to accomplish a similar project as other students, and some students who attend my class have just arrived from the Dominican Republic or are Level 1 ESOL students whose Spanish may be the only language they used in Puerto Rico or at home in the United States. Still more are simply emotionally challenged by various traumatic events: a Pew Charitable Trust report some years ago indicated that at least 75% of female students had been sexually assaulted prior to entering the school and that approximately 75% of male students had witnessed a severely violent event, and of course there are crossover incidents between both groups. Edison serves one of the more poverty-stricken, violent, and drug trafficked collection of kids in the city, but from our view we as a community may be “persistently dangerous” to some statisticians but see ourselves as more normal a sample of America than many would assume: it’s all most of my students know.

How can we battle rap with history and gang up on poetry? My students are fluent in the streets of Philadelphia, some with the barrios of San Juan, Puerto Rico, the ghettos of Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic; they are certainly acquainted with the pop-references of the proverbial radio sound chain, and yet they are handcuffed to poverty like its soundtrack is their heartbeat. My school, Edison High, sits smack dab between two graveyards and an animal kill shelter, around the corner from a juvenile detention center that sends us their graduates with two weeks left in the year, sporting the bling of ankle bracelets and their ears still ringing with the clang! clang! of jail cell bars, into a city with more kids sentenced to lifetime sentences in the juvenile justice system than any other city in the country. Twenty-five percent of my students do not live with their own parents, and a similar number are learning-disabled. Edison High School is ranked 80th out of 82 schools in the city, but believe it or not the kids are ok, because they have grit, they have resourcefulness, they have perpetual persistence and survivability. If they can graduate from Edison, they have survived the biggest challenges that life in American urban society has to offer.

In this climate, we get enough of reality; isn’t it more ideal to be less than real, and go somewhere imaginary, like a book, or a land like Lilliput in Gulliver’s Travels? I would rather my students find solace in their own mental space, interesting imaginary places in their daydreams of something impossible, then make it reality through the effort of their lifetimes...In so thinking, I see how we can cut down the tests to size in poetry; we can excerpt the excerpts like samples of a beat; riff off of the rhythms that hip hop has created, but not as content, but as the vehicle; let’s make American history the subject, let stories be the challenge, and open windows to imaginary worlds. May their mental mumblings be the mystified chanting of certified shamans, and may we find solace in the pages of a book, and the spirit of the stage, and in the sprint to study history. I believe students everywhere can learn from an analysis of Puerto Rican and African American cultural production how to create their own personal framework, but I should make super clear that a critique of Hamilton neither rejects nor celebrates the work; perhaps, however, studying Hamilton helps us all learn how to analyze any dramatic or scripted work, even while the focus is upon learning to create one’s own. After all, as George C. Wolfe famously voiced, “We are all up in each other’s ‘Other’”.² Salmon Rushdie, in his loving praise of The Wizard of Oz, wrote that “The dreams that you dare to dream may come true”, and there is, according to Professor Joe Roach at Yale University, “There is a strand of exceptionalism in American thought”, and it is perhaps this exceptionalism that allows us egos that truly believe we can be the stars of the show; may all our dreams come true.