Dad's Chair (online bonus article)
The CCHS Talent Show and Its Open-Dork Policy
By Greg Benson
Posted April 2009

Those parents who attended the talent show at Clarke Central High School in early April were treated to a wide variety of musical styles. For nearly three hours, the audience sat in the auditorium and watched their own kids and OPKs (Other People's Kids) get up on a stage to risk everything while performing songs that their parents had endured repeatedly over the several weeks leading up to the event.

Through 17 acts, viewers came to realize that talent is not necessarily the domain of the famous. However, what I took from the event was the discovery that this generation is far better mannered than the one whose members would have undoubtedly shouted, "Siddown, dork!" if I'd had the courage in 1978 to approach the mic, claw at my guitar and warble a Beatles song-probably either "Across the Universe" or "Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except for Me and My Monkey."

By the time I'd gotten to "Jai Guru Deva Om," I'd no doubt have dropped into a fetal position from which I'd only recently have uncurled. The two girls who talked to me during my sophomore year would have stopped doing so; I'd be carrying an emotional wound so huge that, like the "Lion King" antagonist voiced by Jeremy Irons, my friends and children would refer to me as "Scar."

Wisely, I played and sang only in my bedroom, eventually writing songs that I recorded on to cassette tapes that, to this day, remain hidden where only my autobiographer can find them. What a dork.

But these present-day kids, these pillars of bravery and spunk, got up there and laid it all out, some succeeding, others failing so blatantly that I tensed and waited for the big hook to emerge from the stage wings and for the cascade of jeers to reduce the performer to a beet-red mass of Jello with a T-shirt protruding from it like a white flag of surrender.

Instead, each participant received encouraging whoops from the crowd, some yelling, "We love you!" Not once during the program did I consider bellowing the word "dork," even when that kid with the weird hat did that really stupid song.

Fortunately, I did not have to squirm in my seat waiting for my own child to perform. Our freshman lad being too bashful to share his considerable talent with his schoolmates, my family attended primarily because no one had invited us to dinner and because the neighbors' kid, Kelsey Brown, was on the bill to sing two of her own songs that we'd witnessed her crafting a few months before. To vicariously experience the parental torture chamber I'd eluded, I sat next to a woman who was there to see her son perform two solo numbers on his accordion.

Now, during my era, a teen would rather have been witnessed wetting his pantaloons than playing an accordion in front of a crowd. But Carlo Nassisse, already an accomplished rock climber and graphic designer, strode to the mike and promptly filled the auditorium with the refreshingly French sounds of the "Theme from Amelie." Looking around, I saw no one giggling or even whispering to each other. Instead, all sat rapt and attentive until the instrument's last breath, after which the crowd erupted in applause.

By the time Kelsey took the stage, most middle-somethings in the audience were edgy, hungry and ready to go. Kelsey quickly remedied that situation by sternly instructing the crowd to sway, a task easy to comply with when one hears her music or imagines her using her guitar as a billy club. The judges agreed, and now we have the Clarke Central High School Talent Show prizewinner living across the street from us. May God have mercy on her family.

Leaving the proceedings, I felt as though our culture had really turned a page. Audience cruelty has been replaced gradually by a well of empathy and support. Perhaps next year Clarke Central will let middle-aged dorks participate as well.