Graduation Speeches
Graduation time will forever bring to my mind the 1997 "Wear Sunscreen" speech... not really a speech at all but an exercise by Chicago Tribune columnist Mary Schmich. The Tribune in its wisdom requires you to pay to read the original, titled "Advice, Like Youth Probably Just Wasted on the Young." Fortunately you can find it all over the internet for free. My favorite line:
Don't be reckless with other people's hearts, don't put up with people who are reckless with yours.Loudoun had 10 graduation speakers this year (I know... commencement addresses) but I've only heard about two that I didn't actually attend, and predictably it was the professional entertainers who drew the comments. Dancer Philip Clyde Bernier spoke to the grads at Park View for what was apparently a very long time, and then sang for them. Comedian Patton Oswalt spoke to the Broad Run grads. Each was invited because he is an alum who showed up on national television several years after graduating.
I'm sure complaints are annual. Last year some folks were upset by the speaker who derided Vice President Cheney from the podium. This year Mr. Oswalt drew the written complaint. I don't know exactly what he said to upset people though "cussing" was mentioned. You can read the parts that weren't controversial in this press release. I think that someone so inclined could have taken a moment to type "Patton Oswalt" into YouTube and then penned a complaint letter well in advance of the speech itself. Not that the person who filed their objection did this, just that I saw this one coming.
Look a little deeper though. Someone doing some checking might also have found Patton Oswalt's own blog entry a few weeks ago discussing this invitation to speak. In it he acknowledges that he wasn't invited to bring gravitas to the stage:
They've got access to museum docents, Senators, Congressmen, political reporters and The Greaseman. But despite this deep pool of wisdom to draw from, they thought, "Let's get that fat dude who tells dick jokes to drunks." I'm lucky enough to count people like Michael Penn, Harlan Ellison and Carl Gottlieb as friends. These are people with true, hard-won wisdom slung from their gun belts. I'm armed with the equivalent of a cheap, Turkish Taser.On that blog entry, just before launching into a "rough draft" of a graduation speech that reads like an adolescent fan sequel for an amalgam of Office Space and Mad Max, Patton Oswalt mentions a speech given by David Foster Wallace in 2005 at Kenyon College.
David Foster Wallace's commencement speech has truly changed me. I think about it every day. Like Bernstein thinking of the girl on the ferry in Citizen Kane. It's changed me for the better.I was intrigued enough to go out and find Wallace's speech, and to read it. It's so meaningful that even just to quote from it here would detract from it rather than summarize or tease as a good quote should do. Take 15 minutes out of your day to find it and read it. How odd that its wisdom would be brought to me by a "fat dude who tells dick jokes to drunks" and the man who complained about the words he used.
If you attended a 2008 LCPS graduation ceremony (or if you graduated!) let me know what you thought of the speaker you saw... and whether you remember him. (I can say "him" because all of the speakers this year were men. Class of 2009 take note.)