by Lauren Keane, Alum
Odyssey taught me that whatever
I chose to do, I should do passionately and invest
in it everything I could. When I auditioned into
the lead role in Lowell’s production of
“Oklahoma!” my senior year, I was
thrilled to be part of a group of people who shared
my love of music and of the stage that Steve’s
plays had first awakened in me. Singing is my
passion and my clearest connection to the world;
working to create something so whole with such
people was my obsession and my reward. There was
so much focused energy, so much excitement, and
so much varied talent on the stage that whenever
I had to miss a rehearsal, I felt as though I
had missed a crucial stage in the growth of a
collective child. So when the thick envelope arrived
from the Coca-Cola Scholarship Foundation inviting
me to Atlanta for a weekend as one of 250 national
finalists for a $20,000 scholarship, I’m
sure I was the only one whose tears of excitement
turned to frustration when I saw the dates.
 I
couldn’t go. I never even really wrestled
with a decision. The now-infamous weekend was
three weeks away, there were no understudies,
and no one felt that they could learn the new
part in time. I had made a commitment to the rest
of the cast. I was an integral part of the family.
There was no way I would just walk away. If I
had, I wouldn’t have been someone who deserved
a prestigious scholarship in the first place.
It wasn’t that Steve’s “character
building” taught me to value long-term educational
opportunity over short-term self-gratification.
But it did teach me to value teamwork, to see
my place in the bigger picture, to honor the commitments
I make.
When I look back I’m still
proudly surprised that walking away from all that
I had worked for in the musical wasn’t really
an option. I negotiated the “what-the-hell-do-you-think-you’re-doing”
response from almost everyone I told; they hadn’t
had my middle school teachers, I told myself,
and few people understood why I valued what I
did. All the while, though, I was miserable inside.
I stood by what I knew was the right choice for
me, but even that couldn’t completely eclipse
the burning fact that I was rejecting a gift that
might allow both me and my parents to financially
breathe a little during the next four years. This
had to be one of the “peaks” that
Steve had pushed us toward, starting when we were
barely twelve years old. I knew what I should
do, but I didn’t know what to do.
So I looked to some of the other
“peaks” I’ve had for inspiration.
When people hear about what I’ve done with
my life so far, they often ask me what it was
that “got me into Yale,” or “got
me all those scholarships,” or “ let
me do it all.” They ask with remarkable
eagerness, as though I hold the pen poised to
prescribe the similar success of their daughters,
sons, nieces, third-cousins-twice-removed, or
yet-unborn grandchildren. So they seem somewhat
befuddled when my answer isn’t to take an
SAT prep course, earn straight A’s, learn
to play Mozart on the bagpipes, discover a cure
for herpes, or rescue stray kittens from trees.
Instead, I laugh and tell them, “Learn what
to do when you don’t know what to do.”
It’s an Odyssey specialty; if I use only
one of Odyssey’s skills for the rest of
my life, it will be the ability to figure out
a plan of action when I’ve exhausted my
options. For my senior year dilemma, appropriately
enough, it was a phone call to Lee Shult, one
of the people I’d learned this from in the
first place. And all I needed was a reminder of
one more Odyssey value that I’d turned to
all too often during the high school haze: just
do it. Take the risk. When it’s physically
impossible to do one more thing that matters to
you, ask for some breathing room and then go do
it anyway.
Three weeks later the curtain
opened and I was Laurey Williams, ready to marry
a particularly good-looking and musically inclined
cowboy on the eve of Oklahoma’s admission
to the United States. Three hours after that I
found myself 35,000 feet above Oklahoma, the stage
makeup still on my face, headed for Atlanta on
the last red-eye flight that would get me there
in time for an interview with Coca-Cola at 11:00
the next day. Two extravagant buffet meals, three
handshakes and four mugs of coffee later, I was
back at the airport, ready to board the flight
home that touched down an hour and a half before
the orchestra director raised her baton for Saturday
night’s opening bars.
Interestingly, I’m fairly
sure that this ordeal is one of the reasons Coca-Cola
gave me the scholarship. My middle school advisor
taught me that the best thing I can do when it
comes to competing with others who are equally
qualified is to make myself memorable –
and I bet there were few stories that set people
apart during those interviews as much as my explanation
of why I would only be in Atlanta for seven hours
out of the weekend. I had a chance to speak with
one of the judges several months afterward, and
she immediately remembered and complemented me
for my dedication to my commitments and to the
people I was working with. “That’s
exactly the kind of values we were looking to
reward,” she said.
All I really need to know, I
didn’t learn from Steve in Middle School.
But I continue to marvel how many of the fail-safe
life tools that deserve to be called “wisdom”
did come from him. What I learned to value ended
up pulling me in both directions, pushing me to
the brink of giving up and then helping me realize
that if I were willing to take a risk, think one
step ahead of what held me back, and sacrifice
a little sleep, I had a chance at the best of
both sides of my dilemma. It’s hard to believe
now that I almost gave all that up, simply because
I didn’t believe it was humanly possible
to do it all. Sometimes I marvel that it actually
was. But even if I had forfeited the scholarship,
I would have done so for reasons I’d still
be proud of. I flung myself headlong into the
task at hand, committed myself to it and only
looked forward. Steve and Lee would have expected
nothing less. |
