Updated: 04/26/2012

 
What a show!!!!  Thanks actors!! 

S
Zyna Bakari's Sandy (center)

Sex, fights, and cars might seem to be just what the guys want but the central issue of Grease is peer pressure.  Sandy Dumbrowski is the one receiving the most; pressured to be a cheerleader, to drink, smoke, and to stop caring what her dad thinks.  If she won't conform her punishment is social ostracism - the same dished out to Eugene and ChaCha for being different.

 The boys also are pressured to exhibit 'male' behavior.  These boys must like fights, cars, smoking, drinking and women or be 'a pansy'.  In the 1950s teenage sex was the business of guys and 'bad' girls.  Nice girls stayed away.  As a no-no topic the youth used their own language to talk about sex such as 'go all the way' and 'getting a little'.  If pregnancy resulted it was largely the woman's problem and so sex for girls was a riskier activity than for boys.

more photos

 Some things have changed since the 50s.  After it became acceptable for all girls to discuss sex topics the rate of teen births was halved.  (You go girls!)  Teenage smoking has also drastically decreased.   Sadly the leading cause of death for all teens remains accidents* of which most (73%) are automobile accidents.   Under Katie Manns direction the actors made the show crystal clear even though some language was modified and one gesture** was deleted.  There was a real group effort by the students to make the show work and it is impossible to pick out which actors did the most. 

Thanks to all who made it a success!

*however for non-Hispanic black males the leading cause of death for teens is homicide.

**The 'up yours' gesture was once common.  I wish it had been left in because it would have shown how far Sandy went with her capitulation to be like the others or even better.

note - the writer was a costumer for Grease.

ChaCha and Eugene (Jamie Miles and Than Reed)

Thursday April 26th the students at Yellow Springs High School experienced the aftermath of a car accident.  A demo of an accident and the ensuing work of EMTs, Care Flight, and others was presented as the senior project of Cole Edwards.  A heartrending story was also told by the mother of a young man killed 6 years ago in an auto accident in which he was a passenger.  I thought of a 17 year old I knew that was killed when she tried to pick up her phone from the floor while driving, (her younger sister survived the crash). ....and nearly everybody knows of similar terrible accidents.  Thanks Cole, the sights and sounds made it seem real!

It's  uncool to drive like a fool !

Megan Kaplon of Yellow Springs (YSHS 08)  received the
Scholar-Athlete of the Year Award for 2011-12 (her senior year)
at Emerson College in Boston. She also received a 'Heart of a Lion'
award for the 2011-12 year in Volleyball.

Megan kept on working toward her dreams - way to go!

at left Megan (#11) hits for the Emerson Lions.

Two stories are interwoven in this book.  One is the tale of the author, a woman trying to escape from an abusive marriage and the other is the difficult lives of the Afghan women the author meets while establishing a school to instruct in the beauty business.  The plucky American woman gets the school going and it greatly helps the local women.  Yet it couldn't have happened without the help of some local Afghan men.  It is a fact of life that men must participate in a country in which women are restricted in a thousand ways simply because of their gender.  The book was an excellent read although it left me wondering if the extreme troubles of Afghanistan might be related to their refusal to value women as full citizens.  What a bleak life to permit interactions between men and women only in the confines of arranged marriage.

May 5th  9 a.m. - 4 p.m.
at the main entrance

This giant collective yard sale in an annual event that benefits Glen Helen.  Drop off donated goods at the same location Friday May 4th 4-7 p.m.

1858 - 1964

Anna J. Heywood was born a slave and was thought to be the child of the white slaveowner himself.  After the Civil War a young Anna went to school to become a teacher of other freed slaves.  An excellent student, she fought for the right to take the courses restricted to men and showed that she could keep up.  Here at school she met and married George Cooper however he died when Anna was just 21.  With the usual role of wife and mother closed to her, she continued as a teacher, author and scholar and graduated from Oberlin College in 1884.

Anna was a strong advocate for black women to participate in higher education.  At 56 she began a Ph.D. program at Columbia University but had to interrupt a year later when she adopted the orphaned five children of her half brother.  Anna found a way to transfer her credits to the University of Paris-Sorbonne however she was required to produce a new dissertation which took her about ten years.  In 1924 she was awarded a Ph.D. and became the fourth African American woman to achieve this distinction.

Anna lived to be 105 and was a pillar of the Washington-D.C. black community.  She was honored with a stamp in 2009.