Too Darn Hot
Musical Theatre Meets Midwestern Weather Talk
I don’t have a lot to say about school this week, other than the first three weeks of a new school year are exhausting and the emotional roller coaster is real! I’m grateful to have students who are excited to talk to each other and to me, and who seem to (generally) want to be at school. I hope that my voice will come back soon at its full volume, and I’m a little over my feet needing epsom salts after work. But all things move apace, and hopefully, by the time things start to cool off outside, we’ll be in a rhythm that works for everyone. On a happy note, as a teacher who started very shortly before the pandemic (and therefore has several classes of students I simply missed in person entirely), I never cease to delight in seeing my former students who are now 8th graders, especially the ones who are excited to see me (most especially when I wouldn’t expect them to be the ones excited to see me).
I think it was Tuesday morning last week when I stepped outside at 6:45am and had the thought, “it might, one day, not be a hundred degrees.” For the recently memorable past (since July 10th, although the feeling might have started earlier), the impending heat has been evident no matter how early I got up. We are on the 39th day (I think) of 100+, and, even as someone who would be anything rather than cold, it’s a lot.
I am a midwesterner, and I simultaneously am driven bananas by people constantly talking about the weather and also cannot stop talking about the weather. I never understood this as a child, despite living on a farm where the weather was actually QUITE important to daily activities (side note: my parents were watering their cattle this week with a hose because of heat stress, which is very bad). Now, I still hate small talk, but also cannot help but comment on weather, whether it’s notably bad or notably delightful - it feels central to my experience (especially since my school is like a California high school; you can’t really leave your classroom without being in the outside) of every day that it’s hard to resist commenting on it.
But when the weather never seems to change (above 100 and sunny forever), it’s both exhausting and unavoidable to talk about the heat and how it’s Too Darn Hot, you might even say, to bring in a musical theatre reference from my first professional theatre production. I’ve been listening to a lot of musical theatre this summer, surprising myself after a decade of decidedly NOT doing that. I listened to Hamilton on repeat after it came out, but, otherwise, largely have stayed away from show tunes once I decided I was going to do “serious” work with Shakespeare (eye roll - not at Shakespeare, but at the either/or thinking of that decision).
I’m not sure what happened to my Spotify algorithm, but in the past month, there have been quite a few Broadway-style hits. Some of those were formative for me in my initial musical theatre focus in high school (30/90 from Tick Tick Boom, which resonates much differently now than it did then; For Good from Wicked, which lands exactly the same and just as deeply). Some are Disney songs that I cringe to admit that I like but I do (Let it Go from Frozen, Touch the Sky from Brave). A third group includes newer or newer-to-me tracks (Satisfied and Burn from Hamilton; I See Stars from Mean Girls, Fight the Dragons from Big Fish; Me and the Sky from Come from Away). These songs, and perhaps a lot of musical theatre, are fantastically emotional, unapologetically sweeping, and catchy as hell.
Which is why I said I rolled my eyes in thinking back on when I decided that “I wasn’t going to do musicals anymore.” It’s true that producing or working on musicals wasn’t for me - I can read music well enough, but my dancing abilities for choreographic notation are nonexistent, and I don’t have a ton of patience with dramaturgical holes (not that “exit, pursued by a bear” is any better). I’m better suited for heady straight plays and found more satisfaction from working on them. BUT. Musicals first captured my attention, and it’s been both surprising and not at all surprising to feel them pulling me back into the stories, the relationships, and the music in a way that nothing else (still) really does.
There’s something elemental about characters who feel or think or believe so much that they have to break into song.
One other thing I’ve been thinking a lot about is people liking things, and how it can be incredibly scary to claim what you like. There are plenty of ways that people attack the things we like or love. And there are plenty of valid reasons to challenge things we like or love. But when our response to this type of challenge (or the frequency of such challenges) brings us to struggle to like anything, or causes us to move from healthy questioning whether what we like that aligns with our values and simply not to like anything (me in grad school), we lose something important. Lisa Olivera talked about loving things in her latest newsletter, which I didn’t see until I had started writing this:
“And sometimes I’ll ask what people have recently—say in the last day or two—come to realize they love, a question that at first seems to be difficult for some of them, as they say, “I like” this, or “I like” that, to which I try to lean on them by saying, “No, no, I said, what do you love?” Because sharing what we love is dangerous, it is vulnerable, it is like baring your neck, or your belly, and it reveals that, in some ways, we are all commonly tender.”
I’ve been on multiple facets of this issue with musical theatre. I’ve unapologetically sung it from the rooftops (high school), taken it way too seriously in a way that would only be tolerated in a conservatory program (college), scoffed at it (later in college), and hidden my interest in it, even from myself (my 20s, maybe until Hamilton came out?). The past few months, which have needed some brightening and some connection to feelings beyond the stagnancy of a darkly foreshadowing overly hot summer, have brought me back to the middle, to a place where there’s joy and connection with musical theatre.
In his book about moral philosophy, Michael Schur talks about how every ten years, you look back on who you were ten years ago and shudder, grateful you’re so much more mature/smarter/more cultured/whatever than you were ten years later. And then ten years later you get to do the same thing. When I was 24, I thought about how silly I’d been to love musical theatre when I was 14. Now I am grateful that my 34-year-old self is a lot less judgy (and I cheer my 14-year-old self for loving something out loud).
Not to try to draw out a theme too far, but it would be inaccurate to say that yoga isn’t part of that shift. Moving toward observation, acceptance, and compassion isn’t something that happens overnight, especially with my cocktail of Gemini sun, Capricorn rising, Type-A to the max, perfectionistic tendencies, and conservatory training. Yoga has helped me say that all those things are okay…and that it’s also okay to like musical theatre and for other people to like whatever they like (provided it doesn’t hurt anyone).
Interestingly, yoga has also been instrumental in shifting my relationship to summer. Two years ago, the second pandemic summer, I remember my yoga teacher talking about the heat, and how it was getting to her, how summer was not her favorite season. I had never thought about summer as something that could possibly be construed as negative (and ascribed the restlessness, listlessness, or anything else-ness that I felt during that season to being bad at whatever I was doing), so her explanation was DEEP permission to realize that, while I prefer hot weather to cold weather if I have to choose, I’m not a summer person. I deeply value physical comfort, and the extreme seasons offer less of that. That doesn’t mean that I have to wish away summer or be cranky that it’s coming, but it does mean that it’s okay to look at my frustration with the heat and go, “yeah, okay, that’s real and fine and not my fault.”
One of the practices that she shared that I now do with my students are called “cooling breaths” in English, which basically equate to rolling your tongue or pursing your lips and breathing in so that the air passes over your soft palate. Then, you breathe out through your nose. I usually do this 3-5 times and, amazingly, feel a degree or two cooler. Highly recommend. You can find a Yoga with Adriene version here!
Also, the September calendar is UP! I’ve only got two classes scheduled in September, but am hoping to add more, so keep checking back!
Wishing you a cooler conclusion to summer! If you’d like to share something you like/love and your journey with it, it would be my honor to read it!