Graduation show

Exactly one calendar month after the Bar Mitzva show, it was the turn of the elder brothers and sisters to celebrate: last night, the high schoolers put on their traditional show to celebrate the graduation of yet another class. My daughter is one of the graduating youngsters.

The basis of the show is always the same: each child (sorry, young adult) in the graduating class is played/imitated by one of the high schoolers in a lower class (in other words, a 16-17 year old will play the part of the 18 year old); the plot is normally non-existent, but the text is full of jokes about the most obvious characteristics of the graduates. These characteristics are normally the more negative ones. Only the graduates themselves understand all of the jokes; we, as parents, might understand upto 75%, and the general audience's understanding varies on a scale of 0-50%. Oh yes, and there's always at least one dance scene which has nothing whatsoever to do with the plot, but enables all the high school children to participate.

Even though understanding the jokes may be limited, everybody enjoys themselves, and I do think that the technical level of these shows is improving yearly.

Each class spends a vast amount of time together, maybe not as much as a corresponding class would have done thirty or forty years ago, but more so than say my class at grammar school. What is a class? It's all the children that are born on the kibbutz during one calendar year. Last year's graduating class was 20, which is very large for Tzora; this year's class numbers 14, and next year's is about the same number. My son's class numbers 15, but this is the last of the big classes.

When a child enters first grade, he spends his afterschool hours in a clubroom. The way that things are organised here, the first three grades constitute one group and the second three grades constitute another group. Grade seven is the bar mitzva year, which of course is the crucible for forging a class's identity: they take a name for themselves (normally an animal - for example, my daughter's class is named "the owl group" and my son's "the deer group) and undergo many joint experiences. During the next few years after the bar mitzva, the group's identity tends to fade, although they have one joint activity a week. The group gets resurrected when some of them move out of their parents' houses and live in a communal setting at the beginning of eleventh grade, and to complete things, there is the trip to Poland, exams and the culminating graduation show.

These children have been together in one form or another since they were born, and of course the ties are very strong. A few years ago, they were even stronger, but adolescence does funny things to one's allegiances, and yesterday's friend can be today's stranger, or even enemy.

Unlike the rest of the graduating class, my daughter decided that the army is not for her. Unfortunately, the army was less decided about that, and so it took a vast amount of to-ing and fro-ing until she was able to get a release (a few days ago). Instead, she intends to do a year of national service (for example, volunteering in a hospital), but she has missed the deadline for this year's allocation, so she will be at a loose end for several months.

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On a completely different subject, I just checked the Bill Bruford DVD site, and all the copies have now been sold. That didn't take too long.

Fairport Convention presumably played a marathon set last night to close this year's "Fairport's Cropredy Convention". There have been virtually no postings of the FC mailing list the past few days, but no doubt from today onwards I will start to read how wonderful it was. I went to Cropredy five times, including a three year consecutive run (1996-1998); whilst I very much enjoyed those years, I didn't like my final year (2000) so much. My disenchantment is as much to do with my increasing distance from the current Fairport style as it is with the physical arrangements. Actually, it's probably much more to do with the music than anything else; if I were totally gung ho about 75% of the acts appearing, then I could put up with all the inconveniences, but as these days I would probably be interested in maybe 5% of the acts, it's clear that I have nothing to look for at the festival.

What surprises me is how much correspondents seem to enjoy themselves, even though they admit that they don't like some of the acts. Is it so much fun sitting in a field for three days and listening to not always good music? Eating peculiar food? Weather either too hot or too cold? Camping at night and being disturbed by all night sing-a-longs or motorcycle gangs? Maybe it's part of the British experience which I have long left behind.