Cary Library Celebrates a Retiring Lady of Letters

Cynthia Johnson

By Jane Whitehead

Cynthia Johnson wanted no fanfare to mark the end of her three decades’ service at Cary Library, most recently as Assistant Director. No speeches, no presentations, she pleaded. But colleagues stealthily plotted an elegant, low-key Regency-themed tea party that took place in the Administrative offices on Thursday, October 30. (The theme was a salute to Johnson’s authorship of 15 historical novels set in the British Regency period, from 1811-1820.)

Among the guests who gathered to eat scones and wish Johnson well were all four Directors of Cary Library with whom she has worked; Bob Hilton, Carol Mahoney, Connie Rawson, and current Director Koren Stembridge, together with current and former staff, Library Trustees, patrons, and members of the Cary Memorial Library Foundation and the Friends.

Recently retired Cary librarian Elizabeth Dickinson presented Johnson with a handsome scrapbook filled with pages created by colleagues and friends. The volume reflects her wit, kindness, sense of humor, athleticism (she swims and runs every day), writing, style (think Burberry raincoats and Mont Blanc pens), and her years of service to Cary Library from her arrival in 1983 as Reference and Young Adult Librarian through two stints as Head of Reference Services, and two periods as Assistant Director. In all these roles, said former Library Director Carol Mahoney, Johnson proved herself “the consummate professional librarian.”

On October 30, 2014, Cynthia Johnson retired after 31 years of service in various capacities at the Cary Library. On hand to celebrate with Cynthia were all 4 library directors with whom she has served.
From left to right, Koren Stembridge, Connie Rawson, Cynthia Johnson, Carol Mahoney, and Robert Hilton.

To the surprise of no Cary Library insiders, Dickinson appeared in a raccoon mask and tail. Raccoon references also peppered the scrapbook. A page headed “Cynthia’s Retirement Reading” featured spoof titles including Day of the Raccoon, and Raccoon on a Cold Slate Roof. Teen Librarian Jennifer Forgit explained that on a winter evening in 2004, a patron at one of the internet terminals gave a cry of alarm as a raccoon fell out of the ceiling, where a tile had become dislodged.

“Wearing her suit and high heels, and not a hair out of place, Cynthia captured it in a recycling bin and took it up Belfry Hill to release it,” said Forgit. “Raccoons have been showing up in her office ever since then,” said Stembridge. “Cynthia’s so well known for being a lover of nature that the staff have endless fun redecorating her office every time she goes away – there’s always some tableau, with animals in costume.”

Jane Eastman, Johnson’s long time colleague on the Reference desk, also witnessed the raccoon ejection. “Cynthia will tackle anything – she’s very dauntless!” said Eastman. Eastman, who retired in 2003, but still works occasional hours in the Library, recalled challenging queries she and Johnson fielded in the pre-internet era. “Do you have a video on making rubber gloves?” “How many stoplights are there in Rio de Janeiro?” “What’s the electrical code of Las Vegas?” From Johnson, said Eastman, she learned two essential qualities of the public reference librarian: “to listen well and have endless patience.”

“Cynthia set a high bar for the rest of us to aspire to,” said Stembridge, noting that Johnson’s “deep research capability” and boundless curiosity made her an excellent match for the intellectually demanding Lexington community. Cary’s impressively broad and deep adult book collection is “really Cynthia’s creation, after all these years,” said Eastman. “She would think about things that people needed to know about, and if she could find a book that would meet the need, she would get it.”

Another part of Johnson’s legacy, said Eastman, is the Lexington Authors’ Collection now housed in the Periodicals Reading Room. Building on a small collection started in the late 1960s, Johnson has gathered over 500 volumes by people who live and work in town, from Nobel Prize winners to first-time novelists. “It’s a great way to demonstrate what a diverse community Lexington is,” said Johnson, noting that the collection spans subject matter from “religion to radar to Shakespeare to politics.”

“I’ve been in denial about Cynthia leaving,” admitted Forgit. “I can’t imagine the library without her,” she said. Calling Johnson “the first real mentor of my adult life,” Forgit recalled how tactfully Johnson had made her realize that she needed to upgrade her fresh-from-campus sartorial style, by asking her to re-write the Library’s dress code. “She is amazingly good at leading you gently into the light,” said Forgit.

In a conversation in her airy office a couple of weeks before her retirement, Johnson was keen to deflect attention away from her personal history and focus instead on the “outstanding organization” that has been her professional home for decades. Over the years, she said, Cary Library has been “blessed with wonderful directors who hired great staff and let them do their thing while quietly orchestrating possibilities in the background: Bob Hilton set the gold standard for the collection with his bibliographic knowledge and expertise; Carol [Mahoney] built us the building, Connie [Rawson] heard the community when they said they wanted programming, and Koren [Stembridge] is the most fabulous yet, identifying community talent and showcasing it here so that Cary remains at the heart of the community in so many ways.”

The library was also the heart of Rockford, Illinois, the prosperous manufacturing town where Johnson grew up. “My mother always took us to the library,” she said, describing her family as “bookish to a fault.” “We had complete sets of Thackeray and Walter Scott, and you never knew that Dumas wrote so many books,” she said. As a girl, she devoured biographies of American historical figures, historical fiction, and on a snow day when she was in high school, discovered Jane Austen. “That was my true love,” she said, and Austen’s Pride and Prejudice still stands as her “all time favorite” novel, closely followed by George Eliot’s Middlemarch.

Growing up in a house full of books and no television, with parents who read the Wall Street Journal rather than the Rockford Register Star, Johnson said she often felt “totally isolated” from her schoolmates. Ahead of their time in many ways, Johnson’s parents rode bicycles, kept a compost heap, did their own yard work, and drove a foreign car, the first in town. Johnson’s father, a reconstructive plastic surgeon who learned his skills treating scarred Battle of Britain pilots in England and leprosy patients in India, “felt firmly that you should leave a place better than you found it, and he instilled that in all of us,” said Johnson, the eldest of three children.

After majoring in English and French at Wellesley College, where another Illinois native, Hillary Rodham, headed the student government in Johnson’s freshman year, Johnson took a Master’s in Library Science at Simmons College. Her first full-time job as a librarian was a four-year stint as Reference and Young Adult Librarian at Memorial Hall Library in Andover, Massachusetts.

Although Johnson enjoyed her time in Andover, she returned to the world of academic scholarship, taking a master’s degree from Northwestern University in 18th-century English and French literature. On completing the degree, poor academic job prospects made her give up the idea of continuing with doctoral studies, but she had polished the research skills that would underpin her success both as reference librarian and writer.

“They do say you’re more likely to be struck by lightning than to sell a book without an agent,” said Johnson. But her experience shows that persistence and knowledge of the publishing industry can sometimes lift a manuscript out of the slush pile. Johnson wrote her first novel in the early 1980s, as a diversion from the stress of job-hunting. When she tried to sell it in 1988, she received polite rejections from three publishers before approaching Signet: New American Library.

Cynthia Johnson’s publicity photo as Evelyn Richardson. Cynthia has published fifteen Regency Romances under her pen name.

After losing the first copy of the story, Signet asked her to send it again, then called her at the reference desk at Cary to offer her a two-book contract. The Education of Lady Frances, published in 1989, was the first of fifteen Regency romances written under the pen name Evelyn Richardson. (The pseudonym is a nod to English novelist and diarist Fanny Burney’s most famous heroine, Evelina, and Johnson’s maternal grandmother, whose name was Richardson.) Johnson’s “Regencies” have been praised by Booklist for their deft incorporation of historical details and “superbly nuanced characters.”

Johnson’s current writing projects are a “fictional biography” of the scandal-prone Swiss-born painter Angelica Kauffman (1741-1807) that she has been working on for five years, and the first book in a trilogy of “Regency Historical” novels. The distinction between the “Regency” and the “Regency Historical” genre is very fine, explained Johnson: the latter being slightly longer, with “more sex.”

As she moves on from full-time work at Cary, Johnson looks forward to writing more, skiing more, and learning to travel at a more leisurely pace. “I just want not to be rushing from one thing to another,” she said. But Cary is a famously difficult place to truly retire from, as attested by the many former librarians, including Eastman and Dickinson, who regularly make encore appearances when needed.

“We’re not going to let Cynthia go!” said Stembridge, laughing. “She’s still going to stay connected and we’ll benefit from her institutional knowledge and her years of experience. This is her library, and she won’t abandon us completely!”

11/24/2014

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Filed Under: Archived Stories, Lexington Organizations, Lexington People Tagged With: Cary Library, Cary Memorial Library, Cynthia Johnson, Lexington, Librarian Lexington

“Parenting Is Not Art”

Kimberly Hackett, LMHC, is a Family-Focused Therapist, Parent Coach and writer.

By Kimberly Hackett, LMHC

Parenting is not art. It’s not a roster of must learn skills. It’s not something to conquer or something you can completely ignore. It’s not a vocation or way of life, a movement, mission or religion. You don’t need training or schooling or even the best possible childhood to “parent.”
And when it happens, there is no turning back but there is turning away and turning towards or standing stock still. Parenting is a happening that permanently changes you – no matter which direction you choose – or don’t.

To parent is to choose, however cavalierly or intensely, or somewhere in between, to let your child belong to you and for you to belong to your child, to commit to the unfolding before you. And in you. It is the only relationship that never ends.

Any adult can attest to the challenges of being an adolescent. Because we’ve all been there. We might remember or choose to forget the intense highs and lows, the awesome curiosity and the constant state of high alert. We might remember the feeling of not knowing who we were, what we were about, or how to get where we thought we should be going.

Adolescence is chaotic but it is also the definition of creativity. “Creativity takes courage,” says Henri Matisse. It’s not a stretch to say, adolescence takes courage. There’s nothing more creative than giving form and meaning to the blank canvas of adolescence, that starting point of defining and shaping identity.

When children enter puberty, they begin leaving the protective cloak of their family identity to seek their own. They leave the sureness of childhood bodies and the security of imaginary play to ponder, explore and experiment with the greatest question of all – “Who am I?” This mighty question ignites the flame inspiring each of us to become artists of our own lives.

Each stage of development presents a crisis which demands resolution. Psychologist Erik Erikson identified the psychosocial work of the adolescent stage as Role Confusion and Identity Formation. The work of adolescence is to trial test new selves while negotiating a rapidly expanding inner world. If adolescents resolve the “crisis” of identity, they develop fidelity, the ability to attach themselves faithfully through intimacy and connection to ones self and to another. If unable to successfully do the work of adolescence, we might feel lost, confused, unmoored.

Adolescence is primarily social and emotional. And so, teens need social and emotional mentors and teachers. This is a challenge since our children spend most of their days in schools that are decidedly left brain and tend to throw their hands up when it comes to the inner lives of their students.
As a result, parents carry the weight of their child’s social and emotional education, the “heart” work of their development. And all that at a time when adolescents are trying to create their own identity separate from their parents.

Social and emotional development and learning is the conscious building of interpersonal (awareness of other’s feelings) and intrapersonal (self-awareness) intelligences necessary for living an connected, engaged life.

Parents can support their child’s social and emotional growth in many ways. Here are eight tips for parents to support their child’s social emotional development.

1. Active Listening – How a parent listens to an adolescent child can positively aid in the work of identity formation. Parents help their children explore the “who am I?” question of adolescence by listening without judgment or fear. Listening with an open heart helps adolescents make sense of their world and their changing selves as they begin the process of taking responsibility for who they are at that moment and who they want to be.
2. Self-Reflection – Where does self-reflection, the foundation of self-knowledge, fit into an adolescent’s busy schedule? Parents can promote this critical developmental need at home in creative ways – conversation around the dinner table or even watching a movie together. Self-reflection needs time to develop and practice to come naturally.

3. Model Authenticity – Adolescents are keen observers of human behavior, especially of their parent’s behavior. They constantly question truth and reality as they experiment with new ways of being. Parents support their child’s search for emotional courage and honesty by living it themselves – or at least by putting ones best effort forward. A good starting place for parents is to not pretend to have all the answers.

4. Promote Creativity – The adolescent work of creating an identity means stepping into the unknown. Like artists, adolescents enter an empty canvas and experiment with colors and materials as a way to accept or reject new ways of being. Creativity gives adolescents freedom to experiment and create themselves in safe and constructive ways. This can be achieved through art, writing, dance, sports, clothing, theatre and music. Parents validate their child’s creative endeavors when expressing their own curiosity with real questions and interest.

5. Celebrate Mistakes – Mistakes mean your child is taking risks and ultimately learning from their experiences. Mistakes are an essential part of growing. Physicist David Bohm writes: “From early childhood, one is taught to maintain the image of “self” or “ego” as essentially perfect. Each mistake seems to reveal that one is an inferior sort of being, who will therefore, in some way, not be fully accepted by others.” This is unfortunate because “all learning is trying something and seeing what happens.”

6. Parallel Process – Parallel process is learning and growing alongside your child. With each moment of your child’s growth, parents are reminded of their own experiences at that age. Simultaneously, perspective is necessary for parents even when they feel there is none. Adolescence joins parent and child in the human journey of self-discovery.

7. The Struggle is Important – Parents often want to pick their child up after they fall down. It is important to recognize that resilience is linked to learned self-reliance. Adolescents need to learn and accept difficulty as part of life and living. They learn what they are made of when they go through something on their own. Parents need to support the important work of struggle as a developmental imperative.

8. Integrating The Dark Side – It can be frightening to witness a once sunny, “problem-free” child transform overnight into a gloomy, irritable adolescent. Some parents find the emerging darker side (self-doubt, anger, fear, self-consciousness) difficult to accept and send the message that the harder stuff of growing up is not accepted. Parents need to integrate the highs and lows, the good and the bad, to support balance and self-acceptance.

Parenting is not art. It’s a relationship that is social and emotional in nature. It is is constant and changing, and demands that we grow alongside our children.

Kimberly Hackett, LMHC, is a Family-Focused Therapist, Parent Coach and writer. She specializes in struggling adolescents and their families. She helps parents focus on relationship, attachment and connection and helps teens achieve greater developmental well-being.
She is writing a book that explores 21st century parenting. Kimberly is married with four kids and divides her time between her private practice in Arlington and Vermont.
Find out more and read her blog at KimberlyHackett.com. Kimberly can be reached at Hackett.kimberly@gmail.com.

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Residents at Brookhaven Celebrate the Launch of “A Common Purpose”

Pictured from left: Joan Keenan, Michael Bentley, Nancy Hubert, Joe Byron of Honor Flight New England and Jim Freehling, President of Brookhaven at Lexington.

Before a packed room, Brookhaven president Jim Freehling took the podium to pay tribute to a team of “greatest generation” residents gathered to celebrate the publication of their new book of essays entitled A Common Purpose.

The book is a collection of personal stories and first-hand accounts of the World War II era. “We wanted to capture the stories,” Freehling said. “These are fading memories and it is very important.”

Freehling paid tribute to Nancy Hubert who he said “really didn’t know what she was getting into!” Nancy acted as the editor for the book and Freehling credits her energy and determination for the success of the project. He also acknowledged Bob Kingston who coordinated the photos for the book. The project was funded in part through a generous grant from The Dana Foundation.

In addition Freehling acknowledged the gracious assistance of Michael Bentley of Bentley Publishing who donated his services to the project. Freehling said, “It is very professionally done and we couldn’t have done it without Michael and his crew.”

Finally, Freehling announced that proceeds from the book sales would go to Honor Flight New England, a company that provides flights to the Washington WWII memorial.

Nancy Hubert thanked her fellow residents who were very supportive of the project “Even if they didn’t have a story in the book, people encouraged me, people asked me about the book and you can’t know what a boost that gave me as I was struggling with finding this or that,” she said. She also expressed special appreciation to Joan Keenan, Heidi White and Kathryn McCarthy who first had the idea to publish the WWII memories of their fellow residents. Hubert also thanked Brookhaven staffer Laura Anderson who “bailed me out many times.”

A special highlight of the program was several personal reminiscences Joan Kennan told of joining the army as a WAV and taking a secret Naval Security Course course at Radcliffe. Bob Solo described a special trip to Rome and a visit to a restaurant where he an his buddies “ordered and ate everything on the menu.”

Most touching was a battlefield recollection of Charles Ketcham who described meeting the eyes of a wounded German soldier: “We were two blue eyed boys in a woods of chaos.”

A Common Purpose is a very personal record of WWII with seventy-two stories by sixty-nine authors.

An enthusiastic crowd purchased books after the speaking program.

To purchase the book, visit www.linnaeanpress.com

“A Common Purpose”

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Filed Under: Archived Stories, Lexington History, Lexington People Tagged With: A Common Purpose, Book Launch, Brookhaven, Colonial Times, Jim Freehling

Rediscovering the Feral Girl

Gail Martin

Lexington Visual Artist Reinvents Herself Through Music

By Digney Fignus

Today’s world is ever-changing and often challenging. People who want to make sense of it all, or at least gain a clearer understanding of the chaos that surrounds us, often defer to society’s artists, musicians, or shamans (who are many times one-in-the-same) to interpret the confusion. It’s been that way since time immemorial. Music, art, and spirituality have always been intertwined. From the first scratches of ochre painted on cave walls to the ancient echoes of primal rhythms beaten on a hollow log, it’s what makes us tick. It’s that “feral” ground where images and metaphors emerge from the stillness of the mind or the world of dreams. They are the fuel that has forever sparked the engine of creativity. This is the landscape where Lexington singer and songwriter Gail Martin draws her inspiration.

After 15 years as a recognized visual artist whose critically acclaimed collections have been exhibited most recently at the prestigious Bromfield Gallery, Martin flipped the script and in 2007 began to concentrate full-time on music and songwriting. Gail is just one of the millions of baby boomers who have decided to reinvent themselves at midlife. It’s a new lifestyle model that the flower-power generation has enthusiastically embraced. With the Pew Research Center estimating that 10,000 baby boomers will be retiring every day for the next 19 years it’s something we can expect to see more and more. For those not ready to retire full-time, pursuing the arts offers an array of opportunities for second-act careers.

At age 58, Gail recently previewed her first studio recording, Feral Girl, at Flora restaurant in Arlington. It was an intimate and eclectic crowd of 30-plus supportive listeners and friends. Gail was accompanied by fellow Lexingtonian and accomplished musician Peter Warren on electric guitar, dobro, and lap steel. They seamlessly performed most of the songs from Martin’s debut CD as well as a few new originals and select cover tunes, including Joan Osborne’s inspirational “One of Us” and the classic Santo & Johnny instrumental “Sleepwalk.”

Gail Martin and Peter Waren performing

Feral Girl is a collection of 11 original songs drawn from hard-won experience as well as the world of imagination and dreams. Gail’s freshman CD is a mix of plaintive appeals, stories of transformation, and stark images of life, its struggles, and its triumphs. Martin examines the mysteries and wonders of existence in songs like the opening number “River” and “Unfinished Wings” with its ethereal harmonies. She fearlessly tackles subjects like growing old in “Ugly Trees” and “Last Flowers of Fall,” and homelessness in her haunting narrative “Bessie.” “Life Hard as Stone” shows off her early roots and a familiarity with the traditional form of folk music in her tale of revolutionary New England farmers.

The process of creating Feral Girl was also a journey of rediscovery. In Gail’s words, “A few years ago, I discovered that at some point of the process of becoming a well-civilized young lady, a part of my personality had been exiled to the depths of my subconscious. I came to call her my feral girl. As I explain in a note on the CD, if I hadn’t recovered the spirit and courage of this part, I wouldn’t have been able to do this work. So I dedicate the album to her.”

Gail grew up in rural New Jersey near the Pennsylvania border. She moved to Boston to attend the Art Institute in 1973 with her self-confessed “Farrah Fawcett hairdo and platform shoes.” She arrived on the scene with the idea of becoming an illustrator or commercial artist. Unfortunately, she soon became disillusioned by discouraging teachers at the school who Gail in some ways blames for “banishing the feral girl” that the new CD is dedicated to. Martin soon left the Art Institute in favor of Emerson College where she became a theater major. Having hands-on experience at creating and designing sets eventually led to a job as a window designer at the Jordan Marsh store that was then located on Washington Street in Downtown Crossing. It was a wonderful creative outlet that led to a passion for visual art and eventual success as a recognized artist in her own right.

When asked about the transition from visual arts to music, Gail reflects, “I was actually very surprised to find how connected the song-writing is to visual art, and how quickly the ability to write my own songs emerged. I think in images and images drive both endeavors. All those cover songs I learned also served as a crash course in writing. The other big surprise was that I felt music allowed me to be even more expressive than the visual arts, enabling me to engage on a deeply energetic as well as imagistic level.”

Feral Girl is a profoundly personal project for Gail. “I have been practicing meditation for many years and most years I take a silent retreat of between one to six weeks. I go to a place in rural Massachusetts that allows me to spend a lot of time in nature, and many of my songs grow out of this opportunity to deeply connect to the nature of life and existence. I’m fascinated with this world and the workings of the mind, how to heal our deepest sorrows, and how to be happier, and try to share what I learn in the songs.”

When I was at the Flora CD preview, I also got a chance to talk with Barry Jacobson, Gail’s partner for the last 30 years and husband of 25 years. Barry first met Gail when he was Registrar of the Cambridge Center for Adult Education and she signed up for a course in yoga. Yoga and meditation are an ongoing theme in their lives. Many of the fans at the showcase were friends from the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center where both Barry and Gail have been practicing meditation and yoga for over 20 years. Gail draws unabashedly from that spiritual well. In her words, “The nature of mind and the mind of nature are my primary inspirations.” The meditation center was also where Gail first met Peter, her musical accompanist, and fellow performer at Flora.

Gail’s choice to preview Feral Girl at Flora is particularly poignant because Chef Bob Sargent, the culinary master at Flora, was in many ways the catalyst for her current musical career. Chef Bob heard Gail singing at a mutual friend’s party they happened to both be attending. Soon afterward he invited her to sing on a recording that one of his musician friends was working on. That experience of recording in the studio sparked a reemergence of one of Gail’s girlhood joys. “As a teenager, I wanted nothing more than to be Joni Mitchell. So my early training on guitar focused on finger-style playing. I sang in the park, sang in chorus, sang in my bedroom. I performed in a folk trio, called (somewhat embarrassingly) Rainbow. In 2007, after many years of exhibiting visual art, my love of music re-ignited when a friend asked me to sing back-up vocals on his CD. I decided to rededicate myself to this somewhat neglected area, dusted off my guitar, found a great vocal coach and started anew. I must have learned 100 cover songs in the next couple of years, and that training period, combined with the feeling for imagery that had informed my artwork, led me to writing my own songs.”

You can hear some of her early influences like Joni Mitchell and Patty Griffin in Gail’s musical crafting. Besides meditation, dreams also play an important role in her writing. Her husband Barry confessed that Gail dreamed about the homeless woman and her dog “Bessie” in incredible vivid detail before putting their story to music. In contrast, Gail’s song “River” came to her while kayaking and contemplating “becoming one with life itself.” Like the river, “To endeavor to live without resistance to whatever state we find ourselves in, come what may.” Her efforts have attracted critical acclaim as well as the attention of local folk legend Vance Gilbert who calls Feral Girl, “satisfying…atmospheric. Her voice is perfect, the stories and writing magnificent, the playing clear and swinging.”

Gail Martin’s transition from artist to balladeer is still evolving, “The process of songwriting is still somewhat mysterious and miraculous to me. I find inspiration in the strangest places, when I am attuned to the world around me in the ideas, the metaphors, the stories seem to arrive synthetically. That is to say that I often feel as though I am a receiver as much as a creator, and that my job is really to practice the skills needed to present the music well, and keep myself open to what wants to be expressed through me. Each song feels like a gift, and with each one I wonder anew at my great good fortune.”

When she is asked about the rewards of recording and producing Feral Girl she is quick to reply, “The biggest thrill has been opportunities to work with talented local musicians. I never found a satisfying way to collaborate in the visual arts, and so art-making was a mostly solitary and sometimes lonely process. When I began to work with other musicians, I was delighted. All the talented people that came in to record on the CD brought so many wonderful musical ideas to the project. It’s like borrowing other peoples’ genius! After so many years of working alone it almost feels like cheating.”

Accompanying Gail on the Feral Girl recordings are Peter Warren; co-producer Larry Luddecke of Arlington’s Straight Up Music studio; Susan Robbins and Marytha Paffrath of the Internationally known women’s world music ensemble Libana; local musicians Valerie Thompson, Beth Cohen, and Jim Gray; and nationally known singer-songwriter Vance Gilbert.

Sunday, November 2, marks the official release of Feral Girl with an afternoon concert at The Burren in Davis Square, Somerville from 2:00PM to 5:00PM. The show is free and open to the public. The performance will feature Gail and Peter as well as other special guests who performed on the CD.

For more information, visit www.gailmartinmusic.com

Colonial Times contributor DIGNEY FIGNUS and his band perform in clubs and festivals around New England. Check www.digney.com for the latest information on upcoming shows.

Gail Martin’s CD – Feral Girl – is available at www.gailmartinmusic.com

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MAESTRO of the MASTERSINGERS

Adam Grossman’s 20th Season

By Jane Whitehead

At 9:00 p.m. on a wet Wednesday evening, twenty or so of the Master Singers of Lexington are sight-reading a song by 19th-century French composer Claude Debussy that requires them to sound like tambourines.

During the tenure of Music Director Adam Grossman, the accomplished chamber chorus has met many such demands. Known for his championship of contemporary composers, and his encyclopedic knowledge of music from Bach to Broadway, Grossman has challenged his singers to imitate everything from blaring taxi horns to farmyard animals, as well as leading them in acclaimed performances of masterworks of the classical canon.

Adam Grossman

To mark his twentieth season with the Master Singers, Grossman has worked with board members to devise programs around the theme: “New Works, Old Favorites, Returning Friends.” “Every concert has a new piece by a composer we’ve premiered in the past, and all the guest artists have also played with us before,” he explains.

The opening concert of the season, at 8:00 p.m. Saturday November 1, at First Parish Church, Lexington, features songs by Mendelssohn, Debussy and Barber, with the first performance of Ruth, a setting for chorus, soloists, piano and clarinet of a part of the Biblical Book of Ruth, commissioned by the group from Vermont-based composer Sara Doncaster. Guest clarinetist Katherine Matasy will also perform Debussy’s Première Rhapsodie for clarinet and piano, with the Master Singers’ longtime accompanist Eric Mazonson. “Eric is a very important part of my experience with the group,” says Grossman, “ and a very important part of what we do.”

Programs Playful and Profound

“One of Adam’s amazing strengths is his inspired, creative programming,” says tenor David Getty. He and his wife, the late Sarah Getty, joined the group in 1976 when it was still a chamber chorus of The Masterworks Chorale, under the direction of the late Allen Lannom. “Adam puts together programs for the four concerts each season, each based on a theme, combining works within a program that contrast and complement one another, and showing great diversity across the season,” says Getty.

The group’s annual Pops concerts show Grossman’s ”playful and creative mind,” says Getty. With titles like “Sue Me!” “By the Numbers” and “Come Rain or Shine,” each concert brings together songs from many eras, linked by a shared theme. For the 2014 Pops concert, “Shall We Dance?” the program included favorites from Broadway and Hollywood, mixed with Gilbert and Sullivan, Argentine tango and a sixteenth-century German galliard. One of tenor Haris Papamichael’s all-time favorite Pops events was “Food, Glorious Food,” for which the program was presented in the form of a menu.

“Adam is first and foremost a serious musician,” says soprano Hope Tompkins, a veteran of choral groups large and small, from Manhattan to Boston. “He makes it possible for the Master Singers to delve deeply into and bring forth the sounds of many centuries, from Claudio Monteverdi to Eric Whitacre,” says Tompkins, who joined the group in 2011. She also appreciates Grossman’s sense of fun, recalling the time when at a Pops concert, he handed out giant day-glow colored sunglasses to all the singers for their rendition of “Stayin’ Alive” from Saturday Night Fever.

A Life in Music

Grossman’s step-brother Joshua Cohen has sung bass with the Master Singers since 1995. He realized at an early age that Grossman had serious musical talent. When they attended a summer music camp in New Jersey together as young teenagers, Cohen remembers that all the campers were given clarinets to try. “I was tweeting around and Adam was playing melodies,” he says. “You got a real sense that he was already on his way.” Grossman pursued undergraduate studies at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, and at Boston University, before focusing on composition as a graduate student at Brandeis University.

Grossman’s career in conducting, composing and music education has made him a familiar figure on many podiums in the Greater Boston area and beyond. He is currently conductor of the Junior Repertory Orchestra on the New England Conservatory of Music Preparatory School, and teaches in the Newton public schools. He is the former Music Director of the Cambridge Symphony Orchestra, former conductor of the Boston Cecilia Chamber Singers, and has taught at the All Newton Music School, and in the Brookline and Somerville public schools, and made guest appearances with groups including Symphony by the Sea, the Longy Summer Orchestra and Chorus Pro Musica.

Grossman’s style as a conductor, says Cohen, is self-effacing rather than self-promoting. “He’s not a ‘personality’ conductor,” says Cohen. “He’s not someone who spends a lot of time talking about his philosophy of music, or describing things in poetic terms. He believes in putting the music first, not the conductor.”

Master Singers’ founding member, soprano Harriet Chmela, 78, says: “I have seen a lot of growth in Adam’s conducting since he began directing the Master Singers, and the group has grown along with him. This has been a very productive twenty years.” Grossman’s demanding but respectful approach to his singers is an important part of that success, says Chmela. “Singers are treated with sensitivity and trust and this is very important for harmony in the best sense of the word,” she says.

Soprano Catherine Sukow agrees. “Adam’s style is a great combination of respect for the music, respect for the musicians, adventurousness, creativity in programming, and passion for the performance,” she says. As an educator with a good sense of humor, he makes the whole rehearsal process a pleasure, she says, from “slogging through the difficult parts” to “building cohesion, adding nuances and bringing it all together for the concert.”

Taking Music to Schools

In 1997, two years after taking over as Music Director of the Master Singers, Grossman started a Children’s Concert series in collaboration with Lexington public schools. “I’m very happy to be able to bring this kind of music to children,” he says. “A lot of kids think choral singing is something you do while you’re in school, or in college, and not only do we give them a chance to sing with us, we show them that this is something some people do for their whole lives.” This season’s free concert will take place at Clarke Middle School, on Saturday March 14, 2015.

A previous Children’s Concert at Clarke encouraged Catherine Sukow to audition for the Master Singers, three years ago. “As a mom, I appreciated the fact that they came to sing a concert for and along with the students,” says Sukow. She wondered about the source of “the crazy, fun rounds that they got the whole audience to sing,” and found out later that they were Grossman’s creations.

Sukow looks forward to tackling a full-scale Grossman composition in the final concert of the season, on May 16, 2015. This will mark the official 20th Anniversary celebration, says Grossman, who will make also an unusual appearance on that occasion as a violinist, in the ensemble accompanying guest artist Frank Powdermaker in J.S. Bach’s Violin Concerto in A Minor. As for his own composition for that concert, Grossman says: “it is not yet completed or named.” He adds with a laugh, “But we’re talking about May here, so we’re on schedule.”

Grossman’s ability to inspire loyalty among his singers is attested by the long-term commitment of so many members of the ensemble. “I look forward to each season, and hope to be part of the adventure for many more,” says Chmela. For his part, Grossman highly values his enduring partnership with the Master Singers. “No conductor is guaranteed a position,” he says. “Anybody who has the good fortune to be a music director, let alone to work with a group for 20 years, is a very lucky person.”

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Filed Under: Archived Stories, Lexington Organizations, Lexington People Tagged With: Adam Grossman, Colonial Times, MasterSingers

Relationship Parenting – A 21st Century Requirement

By Kimberly Hackett, LMHC

Kimberly Hackett, LMHC

“She doesn’t need me. She tells me a thousand ways everyday.”

Don’t believe it. She does need you. Now more than ever.

The parent/child connection is our most precious and enduring relationship. Like Yin and Yang, the sun and moon, Laurel and Hardy, one cannot exist without the other. We belong together. We balance one another. When it works, it feeds our soul. When it doesn’t, it is demoralizing and destabilizing – for both parent and child.

Cultivating relational health in your parent/adolescent relationship, even when your teen is actively blocking you, takes reinvention, persistence and a willingness to look inward. It can be a difficult transition moving from parenting an adoring, pretty-perfect, pre-adolescent child to parenting a teen, whose developmental job is to differentiate from her parents.

Differentiation is that growing space between you and your adolescent, where too much space becomes disconnection and too little space hinders growth. The parent/child relationship from birth onward is all about negotiating that precious space.

One way of thinking about and measuring the health of your parent/adolescent relationship is to take a closer look at the quality of the space between you and your child. This can be measured by how reactive you are around your child. Space brings calm, the ability to see more clearly. It is where the relationship thrives.

The parent/adolescent relationship demands flexibility simply because a teen’s changing needs and sense of self is dynamic and in constant flux. Understanding your teen is much like reading a book where crucial plot points are redacted. Teens are literally hard to read. And because communication changes so drastically during adolescence, it’s critical that parents adjust their expectations and perceptions along the way – not only of their child but also of themselves.

This means, quite simply, that parents must grow alongside their teen. It is a parallel process of mutual growth. It is as much internal work as it is external.

Relying solely on grades, friends or other external factors to gauge the well-being of our adolescent children can be misleading. It takes the parent out of the relational space, making them judge and juror, someone who is watching their life, not part of their life. This leads to a power dynamic where both parent and adolescent struggle with who holds the power between them, creating a match of wills.

A relationship is not one of power, but of connection, that includes mutual respect and self-respect.

Because teens want to keep parents at bay, to insure their social-emotional freedom, kids become expert actors, transforming themselves into who their parents want them to be. When parents attune to the relationship, they see beyond the “act.” Because relational parents work at being curious and engaged, teens are less likely to hide in plain sight.

In an age where cyber friending passes as relationship currency, parents are called upon as an antidote to heightening social and emotional alienation.

Real time connection is fast becoming a 21st century parenting requirement. Our children need parents to ground them, to daily sit across from them, face to face, to talk, to listen, to work through the discomfitures of this most important relationship, and to not cave in to the scowl but insist upon what’s beneath.

Only seven percent of communication is verbal, the rest is vocal, facial, gesture and posture. Parents who zero in on their child’s non-verbal language tune into their teen in a more comprehensive way. Kids need to be seen. All the cyber visibility in the world will never replace what it feels like to be seen in real time.

The 21st century parent/adolescent relationship is much like turning the radio on. When there is static, you automatically adjust the dial for clearer reception. Static is important. Static lets parents know something is up, something needs attention. Static catches your attention. It’s the red blinking light. You know to slow down and focus in, to both yourself and your child.

In 1953, pediatrician Donald Winnicott coined the term, “good enough mother.” The good enough parent is someone who works at it, but is not always successful, someone who doesn’t give up, someone who accepts the messiness and work of relationship.

The success of the parent/adolescent relationship must start with the parent. Many parents don’t like to hear this. Old school parenting thinking creeps in – “do as I say, not as I do.” “How dare she talk to me that way? She needs to change.” But the parent/adolescent relationship must remain an inherently unequal relationship. Parents must be in charge. They must set the relational standard. Your efforts now will be repaid hundredfold in your child’s future relationships, both personal and professional.

Our 21st century teens consider themselves relationship savvy and cooly cynical about connection, especially when it comes to their parents. Yet they are craving authentic connection. Teens today have instant access to escaping any relationship that hints at awkward or scary. This is where relational parenting comes in.

Our children are fast becoming the Disconnect Generation. Whenever they are the least bit relationally uncomfortable, they can block, delete, or un-friend anyone in an instant. Sitting in their room pondering life, sitting with “awkward” or “scary,” without screen escapism, is fast becoming ancient history. Parents are beginning to truly grasp the stark reality that we have no control over what worlds our children enter behind their bedroom door.

All the more reason then, that relational parenting is needed more than ever. Solid, firm and loving connection is the antidote to silence behind closed doors. Our 21st century children are in need of their parents’ presence in their everyday lives. Tenacity is at the top of the list of parenting traits we must all acquire. We must stick to our children with a different kind of glue, a glue that binds parent and child in real time connection.

Finally, parenting takes courage. A lot. It asks a lot of parents to stay connected to children who send strong messages they are no longer needed. But please don’t believe them. You are needed now more than ever.

Everyone benefits when parents commit to relational parenting, to insisting on connection with their child. Our children need us in a new kind of way. They need our presence, our conversation, our ability to be firm and loving and calm. They need us to keep trying, to not forget how important we are to them. They need us to insist on relationship and to remind them that life is all about cultivating those relationships, those real relationships.

Kimberly Hackett, LMHC, is a Family-Focused Therapist, Parent Coach and writer. She specializes in struggling adolescents and their families. She helps parents focus on relationship, attachment and connection and helps teens achieve greater developmental well-being.
She is writing a book that explores 21st century parenting.Kimberly is married with four kids and divides her time between her private practice in Arlington and Vermont.
Find out more and read her blog at KimberlyHackett.com. Kimberly can be reached at 617-475-0942, or email – Hackett.kimberly@gmail.com.

Parenting Matters is a collaboration between the Colonial Times Magazine and the Town of Lexington Human Services Department. This column is not intended as a substitute for therapy and the contents are do not necessarily reflect the views of CTM’s editorial staff. The information contained in Parenting Matters is for general information purposes only and should not be considered a substitute for the advice of a mental health professional, diagnosis or treatment.

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Filed Under: Archived Stories, Parenting Matters Tagged With: Colonial Times, Kimberly Hackett, Lexington, Lexington's Colonial Times, LMHC, Parenting Matters

Local Couple Creates “Lexington Soaps”

By Devin Shaw

Umesh Shelat

In 2005 Umesh and Radha Shelat had a son. By the time he was two years old he had developed mild eczema. “We tried everything, over-the-counter products…commercial products. Nothing worked at all, it wasn’t severe but it was causing irritation, so my wife decided ‘I’m going to make my own soap’,” Umesh explained.

The homemade soap helped his son almost immediately, “It was very plain and non-fragrant—but it worked; the eczema was gone after two weeks,” Umesh told me. After that, she began experimenting with different fragrances and different essential oils. “We loved it,” he went on to say. “For about a year we just made it for ourselves. We started giving it away as gifts. Our friends liked it.”

Umesh comes from a business background; he has spent 20 years working in the investment industry on both the buying and selling side. He realized that there was potential with the soap they were making. “We thought, ‘We like it, our friends like it—maybe other people will like it?’”

Radha spent time perfecting her recipes. “We continued like that for a couple of years, and in 2012 we formed our company Lexington Soaps,” Umesh said.

The chemistry of soap making is called saponification. According to the soapmaking expert David Fisher from About.com, saponification is an “exothermic (gives off heat) chemical reaction that occurs when fatty acids come into contact with lye.” Saponification, he explains, means “turning into soap” from the word, “sapo” the Latin word for soap.
A precisely calibrated recipe is crucial, because each kind of vegetable oil requires a different percentage of lye in order to fully saponify. The by-products of the saponification reaction are glycerin and soap. Radha comes from a highly technical engineering background that requires extreme precision. Her background has translated well into soapmaking. Said Umesh, “You have to be very precise. It’s very detailed oriented.”

“The first process involves combining butters and oil,” he explained. “Then you add a lye mixture to it that reacts with the butter and oil combination to create the soap.” The big vat of soap has to be poured immediately into specific molds. The saponification process takes 24 hours. Once that 24-hour process is complete there is not lye left. “The next day we take it out of the mold, cut it and stamp it. We let it cure for 4 weeks.”

Quality is very important to both Umesh and Radha. They had always wanted to have their own business and according to Umesh they regularly asked themselves, “What can we make that we feel is the best product out there—without mortgaging the house?” After discovering their ability to make high-quality soap they had an answer.

Umesh and Radha want to provide an outstanding product to the residents of Lexington. Umesh explained, “We live in this town of Lexington—and it’s a unique town. We have a product that is representative of what we love about Lexington. It’s a quality of life; the people that live here are the best at what they do. After living here for years, it occurred to me that we want to have a product that was consistent with the theme and the culture of the town on an intellectual basis—a high quality product for a high quality town. We realized by making soap we could deliver on that dream.”

Lexington Soaps makes a wide range of all natural products. Clockwise from top: Cucumber Melon Soap, Sandalwood Shaving Soap, Sage Lime Soap, Blackberry Sage Shaving Cream and Lavender Soap.Each soap is made from emollient rich butters and oils and delicately scented with essential oils. These handmade soaps are beautiful and make great gifts. Find them at Theatre Pharmacy in downtown Lexington and Santoro’s Ace Hardware in Bedford. Order direct from: www.lexingtonsoaps.com.

www.lexingtonsoaps.com

Umesh gave me a sampling of their soaps to try for myself. I was impressed. The fragrances are refreshing, but it is the moisturizing quality of the soap that is superior. “Our soaps are not super-high lather, and if you look at other high-end soaps they don’t claim to have a lot of lather either. We want to create tiny bubbles that will help moisturize the skin.”

The all natural ingredients are highly emollient. For example, the Cucumber-Melon soap contains real pureed cucumbers along with African Shea butter, canola oil, palm kernel oil, extra virgin olive oil, castor oil, distilled water, and cucumber melon essential oil.

The Lexington Soaps recipes have been developed with care to provide a gentle, luxurious experience. They also offer Body Butter, Lotions, Balms, Sugar Scrubs, Shaving Soaps and Cream as well as lip balm. The fragrances range from Cranberry Spice, Sage Lime, Oatmeal Honey to a White Tea and Ginger. “We have floral, herbal, citrus and woodsy fragrances. We follow a certain perfume pattern,” Umesh explained. There is an unscented soap for those who are sensitive to fragrance and rich and gentle goat milk soaps.

The Lexington Soaps Spa Box makes a great gift.

Each soap is packaged in its own “drawer” for a lovely presentation.

The shaving products really delivered. I’ve been shaving since an early age and have incredibly sensitive skin. Since I often suffer razor burn, I am always on the hunt for great products. I have tried everything including an expensive line from Nordstrom and the exclusive Shaving Company brand. In every dimension, the Lexington Soaps products surpassed even the most expensive products I have tried. My skin was well moisturized, free of razor burn and the shave was incredibly close. My typical five o’clock shadow did not show up until much later which was an added bonus!

Umesh and I agree that shaving should be enjoyable. Lexington Soaps provides a shaving soap that is perfect if you use a brush while shaving; and if you do not use a brush you can use their shaving cream as I did. “The shaving cream is all oils and butters. It is emolliating and extremely moisturizing,” Umesh said.

If you want to treat your skin, especially if your skin is sensitive, summer is a great time to give these products a try. Sun, saltwater, insects and sweat can be a nightmare for delicate skin. Lexington Soaps products can be found at Theatre Pharmacy and Santoro’s Ace Hardware in Bedford. You can also purchase their products from their website Lexingtonsoaps.com.

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Lexington Montessori Celebrates 50 Years

By Jennifer Goebel

Where Pleasant Street crosses under Route 2, a collection of unassuming white, Federal-style houses hosts one of Lexington’s educational rock stars: Lexington Montessori School. This June, LMS celebrates its 50th anniversary. For many Lexingtonians, this may come as a surprise—Lexington is known for its excellent public schools, but this world-class Montessori school tends to fly under the radar.

Started in 1963 by a group of Lexington parents looking for a different kind of education for their kids, the small preschool opened in its present location—130 Pleasant Street—in 1965. Fifty years later, the campus consists of four buildings and has a student body of 230. Students range in age from 21 months to young teenagers (8th grade), and come from more than 20 surrounding towns.

“LMS is here because there are Lexington families who believed in Montessori. When you choose Montessori, you are choosing a different educational philosophy,” says Aline Gery, LMS’s Head of School since 2006. “We’re grateful to be part of such a wonderful community that supports us.”

WHAT IS MONTESSORI?

Montessori schools take their name from Maria Montessori, an Italian physician and educator who opened her own school, Casa dei Bambini (Children’s House), in a low-income district of Rome in 1907.

The Montessori Spark
In 2011, Wall Street Journal ran an article about the surprising number of highly successful, creative people who are Montessori graduates: Larry Page and Sergei Brin (Google founders), Will Wright (creator of Sim City and Spore), Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia founder), Jeff Bezos (Amazon founder), Sean “P. Diddy” Combs (Rap artist), and Julia Child (French chef). Dubbed the “Montessori Mafia,” many of those interviewed credited Montessori with allowing them to think creatively and discover things on their own.

“Maria Montessori was all about watching kids,” says Gery. “She paid attention to the fact that kids don’t spend a lot of time sitting down. She realized that manipulating their environment is critical to how they learn and how their brains develop.”

Montessori’s educational philosophy initially caught the attention of educators all over the world, but after a brief popularity that lasted until the 1920s, the movement stalled. In 1953, Dr. Nancy Rambusch, an American educator in search of alternatives to traditional schools, met Mario Montessori, Maria’s son, at a conference in Paris. Inspired, she started teaching Montessori classes in her New York City apartment for her own children and others, and launched the first American Montessori school in Greenwich, Connecticut in 1958. Today, there are more than 1300 Montessori schools in the United States, including more than 400 programs in public schools.

A BOOK GROUP AND A DREAM

Jane Mack

LMS’s founding can be traced back to a women’s book group in Lexington in the late 1950s or early 1960s. The story goes that the group read one of Montessori’s books on early childhood education, and became inspired to try it in Lexington. Jane Mack (photo at right), a member of the group, travelled to Greenwich, CT for workshops in Montessori teaching at the Montessori school founded by Rambusch. Mack was the school’s first teacher, holding classes in the basement of Temple Isaiah in 1963. Happy with the program’s success, Mack and parents of the preschoolers looked for a permanent home for the school, and finally found one in the old David Wellington Homestead, which had just recently ceased its run as a restaurant called The 1775 House.

Mack continued to teach classes, lead the school, and travel to conferences to learn more about Montessori education. She studied the Montessori approach to infant and toddler care at the Montessori Birth Center in Rome, and continued to supervise the LMS toddler program as she spearheaded the growth of the school. Mack served as headmistress until her retirement in 1991. Under her leadership, the school grew to 200 students from 18 months to sixth grade. When the school added a lower elementary building in 1990, it was named in her honor.

A DIFFERENT KIND OF CLASSROOM

Biff Maier teaching.

Montessori classrooms around the world may differ, but all of them have some things in common: multi-aged classrooms, self-directed learning and discovery for long blocks of time, and no grades or tests.

“When people go see a Montessori classroom for the first time, I tell them they should think in terms of seeing a professional environment, like an architectural firm,” says Biff Maier, Director of Faculty and Curriculum Development. “It might look confusing—you might see a small group having a meeting, a few people working at drafting board, people doing presentations, and some people standing around the coffee machine chatting. You wouldn’t think it was bedlam, you’d think people are working. That’s what you will see in an LMS classroom—there will be kids working on a problem together in one part of the room, a teacher giving a small group lesson in another part, and some kids chatting or wandering around.”

Montessori schools are also famous for their manipulative materials. Rooms are laid out in categories—literature, math, science, history—and curriculum materials are sequenced from the most fundamental to the most complex. While there are milestones and educational objectives that all the children must reach, when and how they accomplish those, with whom, and how they demonstrate mastery, are primarily directed by the students themselves.

“The best of my day is hearing from the kids how their day is going,” says Jasmine Duffy, Children’s House Head Teacher for PreK and Kindergarten, and an LMS alum herself (1999). “I love watching the children work with the Montessori materials and make their own discoveries.”

Maier admits that this is hard for some parents and teachers. They may really like the idea of kids taking leadership roles in their learning, but they still want the accountability that comes with conventional classrooms and conventional metrics of achievement: standardized tests and grades.

“There’s a different kind of trust in Montessori schools,” says Maier. “I tell teachers that the secret of classroom management is to not be surprised when people are doing what’s appropriate, but to be surprised if they don’t. If they feel trusted, the students will respond. That’s what good bosses do.”

Above Aline Gery, LMS’s Head of School since 2006, pictured with her literature circle.

Gery, who was a high school teacher before coming to LMS, says that how she talks to and understands kids is very different now that she has been immersed in Montessori.

“That pervasive respect for kids, the way all the adults interact with their smaller charges here, is infectious. I think kids leave here with more than just knowledge; they know they have something to offer. They are confident kids who succeed as citizens of their new communities.”

TEACHING THE TEACHERS

This summer, Montessori teachers from around the country and the world will come to LMS to receive training at the Montessori Elementary Teacher Training Collaborative. Maier, who has been training teachers for more than 30 years, is excited to have the training program at LMS for the second year. The program had been in New Rochelle, NY for many years, but recent changes allowed him to bring the program to Lexington.

Training Montessori teachers is different from most other teacher training. It looks, in fact, rather like a Montessori classroom.

“We treat the teachers the way we want them to treat the kids. Autonomous, independent, in charge of their own training,” explains Maier. “We give teachers a real toolkit, not just a philosophy. We tell them what to do and even what to say. Montessori is scripted, but even so, people using the same script can have very different styles and ways of connecting.”

TEACHING THE KID’S KIDS

As it enters its sixth decade, LMS is seeing children of former students enroll. And, three teachers currently on staff are LMS graduates themselves.

“Being a Montessori teacher helps keep me optimistic about our uncertain global future because Montessori truly believed that children are significant agents of social change,” says Laini Szostkowski, Upper Elementary teacher and LMS alumna (1991-2001).

Long after they leave the school, LMS students remain connected. Maier brings back a group of students who have gone on to high school or college to talk about how Montessori education has shaped their lives each year.

“So many of them say the biggest difference that Montessori made in their lives was the habit they made of having relationships with teachers. They felt confident and valued, and weren’t afraid to jump the fence between teachers and students that exists at so many schools,” explains Maier. “They also talk about organizational skills they learned, and how much they like being in control of their education.”

CELEBRATING 50 YEARS

Pictured left: The Montessori property when it was the 1775 Restaurant (note 1775 on chimney). At the right, an original menu from the restaurant. Despite the restaurant’s name, the original house was likely built circa 1805 by David Wellington, known as “Captain David,” who was a tanner and farmer, as well as the deacon of the First and Follen Churches. The house then passed to his son Francis Wellington, and then to the Bartlett family, who were also farmers. Around 1936, the house was transformed into the restaurant, which it remained until LMS purchased and renovated it in 1965.

“So much has happened in 50 years to strengthen the school,” says Gery. “Some families are with us just for the preschool years, while others may be with us for 13 or 14 years, sometimes longer if they are sending more than one child through the school. It’s their support and their vision that allows us to expand and grow.”

The school’s former life as a restaurant is not forgotten by town residents or the school’s leadership, however.

“Just last week, a woman came into the building because she was lost. It turns out she had her wedding reception at The 1775 House Restaurant,” says Gery. “People still remember this area before Route 2 was built. These buildings are part of the Lexington community.”

As part of the 50th anniversary celebration scheduled for June 14 (see above), the school is inviting members of the community who might have pictures, information, or artifacts from the early years of the school to stop by and share their history and memories.

“We would really love to hear from students and teachers from the very earliest years of the school,” says Gery. “When alums and past parents visit LMS, they often say that all they loved about their time here is still evident, while also being pleased to see we have solar panels, student gardens, an expanded library and, most of all, a middle school!”

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Filed Under: Archived Stories, Lexington Organizations Tagged With: Lexington Schools, Montessori, Private Schools

Twelfth Night at Bridge School

By Laurie Atwater

Visit Bridge School in the early morning before class, or after school, and you may find that you’ve been transported back to Shakespearean England by enterprising thespians and their intrepid director Leslie Colby. Long after Lexington lost its elementary theater specialist, Ms. Colby has kept theater alive at Bridge. For fourteen years, her Shakespeare Troupe has been staging an abbreviated version of Twelfth Night or What You Will.

“It started out as a class project,” Ms. Colby explains. But when the curriculum began to move to quickly to accommodate in class projects of any scope, Colby was undeterred. Giving generously of her own time, she actually expanded her little Shakespeare experiment to include all Bridge 4th and the 5th graders who wanted to audition.

The Bridge Shakespeare Troupe was formed with the goal of presenting one yearly production that was true to the text and the spirit of the original.

And Ms. Colby knows her Shakespeare. She earned her BA and Masters in theater education and has directed and acted in many adult productions over the years. Her husband Robert (Bob) Colby is the director of the elite graduate program in theater education at Emerson College. Together they have theater in their blood. Most recently Ms. Colby was the recipient of an LEF Summer Fellowship Grant which she used to study drama in London at the Globe Theatre. “I did some workshops there and I did a lot of work with Shakespeare.” Work that she’s putting to great use at home in Lexington. Colby tells me that the sets for the play are modeled on the original Globe Theatre sets for Twelfth Night.

What’s great about this story is that I would never have known about Ms. Colby or this Twelfth Night production if it were not for one parent who wanted to highlight this great educational experience in town. She reached out to me because she realized that special alchemy was happening at Bridge school—that moment when teaching and learning were combining to create the magical potion called education. This isn’t test prep, drills or CORE requirements, this is the education that inspires and reaches deep within students to foster real joy in learning.

Colby is a big fan of this special joy. She would have to be. With the demands of modern curriculum requirements, Ms. Colby no longer has the classroom time to devote to Shakespeare. All of the work for the production is done on her own time, but she is quick to say that her enthusiasm for the project has never waned. And she credits the Lexington parents for helping to keep it going. “We would never be able to do all of this ourselves for so many years,” she says. Even with her husband’s help, it’s a challenge to manage everything that goes into the production. “We have one family that has let us use their basement for storage,” Colby says laughing. Indeed the Edelman family on Middleby Road has saved the Bridge School Shakespeare Company.

Because the school does not let them store any of their materials on site, they have relied on the kindness of these neighbors whose children have been Colby thespians over the years. Andy, the youngest Edelman just performed in Willy Wonka at the middle school and is planning to attend Walnut Hill to pursue his passion for the arts. Over the years hundreds of parents have sewn costumes, applied makeup, painted sets, gathered props, and gotten their children to rehearsal. The children never forget their experience. “Once they are part of the Shakespeare Players,”Ms. Colby says proudly, “they come back year after year to support the new kids and see the play.” And of course to see her.

The reward is worth the effort for Ms. Colby. “I have children who have all different skills and abilities, but they all learn and grow,” she says. “You can see their improved confidence—they learn to work cooperatively and master a task over time,” she says. Theater is a lot of work. Children not only memorize their lines but they have to understand the context of what they are saying and refine their delivery. The have to be accountable to the other actors—learn their blocking and their cues, hit their marks and become part of the company. It takes cooperation, self discipline and teamwork.

Parents are thrilled to see their children performing in public and developing those skills that will be important as they grow. “It’s really such joy and excitement,” Ms. Colby says, “A feeling of accomplishment that they don’t get from a short little paper or a worksheet. That joy—it’s why I wanted to teach in the first place and it seems to be diminishing every day. When the curtain goes down and the company takes a bow, Leslie Colby always sheds a tear or two, but only for a moment because next year she will begin anew! [Read more…]

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Sunday April 27 – Reception celebrating this year’s winners!

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