Fellow alumni, RWU faculty and administrators, family and friends, Nancy and Bill;

Louis Armstrong once said, “What we play is life.”   Life itself certainly has been the cornerstone of Bill Grandgeorge’s teaching for the last 40 years.  Those among us who teach know a little something about what it means to be a parent of a perpetual cadre of teenagers—literally hundreds of them.  Often they dazzle you, but no matter how many come and go over every epoch of four years, the general experience remains pretty much the same: strive to acquaint them with the skills of the discipline, hope to ignite a passion for its mythical historical foundations and its integral role in society, and help them to discover a way to navigate the world through the extraordinary lens of the Theatre.  I am sure that I am not alone in recalling the peculiarly Grandgeorgian method in which this was accomplished.  I suspect that most of my fellow alumni would agree that the most profound lessons that we learned were rarely the ones contained in a lecture or conveyed in a classroom.  And they usually were not indicated on some lesson plan or syllabus.  Instead these moments were more likely to be on the fly or off the cuff, as G prefers to teach by anecdote, metaphor, and allegory.  In my own case I recall:

• Laying furring strips for the Man of La Mancha floor at 3 a.m., and the lesson that morning was philosophy and justice—what would a person be willing to die for, and the corollary question, what does a person then live for?  G showed us that Don Quixote lived for honor, and in the years following Viet Nam and Watergate, many students my age were wondering just what that was.
• G sauntering by the coffeehouse at 1 a.m. to announce that he would be conducting a paint mixing lesson in the janitor’s closet despite being dressed in his usual sartorial splendor…minus, however, his pants.  Our Town was in rehearsal and that night we discussed what it means to live a considered life.  G pretty much recited verbatim Emily’s goodbye speech, but in the hushed intimacy of that closet with only a handful of us gathered around, elbow deep in pigment and fish glue, the speech suddenly was magic—Virgil, Thoreau, and Joseph Campbell all at once—it became like a call to prayer, and each of us understood that we were being urged to look seemingly into the world beyond the common boundaries of our lives and to believe in its wonder.  As Virgil says, “They can conquer who believe they can.”
• Coming into school in the morning, G and I switching off the driving so that Nancy could take the car to Providence and not always have to rely on RIPTA.  Those mornings we were on our way to a Modern Drama class, but the conversation in the car was usually focused on another drama (and now that I have been teaching for 20 years, I know that it is not so modern)—that of coming of age and the choices that a young adult faces.  I am sure G saw us through more romances, heartbreaks, and trauma than Ann Landers, but he did it with compassion and humor—and the occasional delicate kick in the pants.
• When our dear friend suddenly passed away and Bill told us that of all of the songs from the musical we were working on and for which she had been the flautist, Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living In Paris, we would be singing the plaintive If You Go Away at the memorial service.  None of us had as yet experienced the loss of a peer and he walked us through the paradox of grief and love, and showed us the comfort of memory and the gift of service. 

Hamlet says, “We know what we are but not what we may be.”  Of course, like Hamlet, as young college students, we didn’t know who we might become, but Bill had a pretty good idea…and a lot of faith.  And looking around this room, it turns out that it was a pretty good idea to put our selves in his hands--those hands that reached out to teach us tolerance, fair play, compassion, self-knowledge, proportion, and community.  Anatole France might have been thinking of Bill when he said, “To accomplish great things we must dream as well as act.”  Well, Bill Grandgeorge still knows all of our names and he did indeed know most of our dreams—he helped us to see our dreams as possibilities and, more importantly, he taught us to act on them.

Elizabeth (Betsy) Carlin-Metz ‘76

June 9, 2007