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Good Evening.
First I want to thank you for this incredible honor. I am overwhelmed and humbled to be standing up here tonight.
I want to thank my parents and brother for coming, and for loving, encouraging and sustaining me.
There are two people no longer with us, who I’d like to honor as best I can with a few words.
My grandfather shuttled me back and forth to the high school ‘til I could drive, sat through even the plays like “Chess” that weren’t exactly his style, thrilled just to see me in the chorus, and taught me about how to treat other people, just by his example. He was a faithful viewer of “The News with Brian Williams,” and it was great knowing every night he was watching.
My fellow alumni and friend David Lilly is an inseparable part of so many of my memories of high school. As some of you know, David was quiet, but he had an acerbic wit, and always seemed to know when I was feeling particularly frustrated or down, at which point he would sort of sidle up next to me and say something truly hilarious that would make me forget whatever I was so worked up about. David was extremely talented and too smart, and our class just wouldn’t have worked without him.
When I was in the 4th grade, my parents put our house in Raleigh up for sale and we moved to Germantown. At the time I was going to a private school, and I really loved it. I was, in fact, the president of the 4th grade, which at the time seemed like a pretty important job. Since the schools in Germantown were so good, my parents told me the next year I would have to start middle school at Riverdale. Well, after fighting and whining about it I finally threw up my hands and said, “Okay! But just know that you’ve ruined my life!!”
Well, as it turns out, my life was not ruined, quite the opposite. I tell this embarrassing story on myself because it made me realize that things don’t always go just how you’d like them to, and that’s a blessing, because not only would that be pretty boring, there may be some opportunity out there for you that’s better than you could have imagined. And the Fine Arts Department was that for me.
My freshman year of high school, I started to get involved in the program, in small ways. I took introduction to the theatre, joined the make-up crew for “Anything Goes,” and duped my neighbors into buying some of the worst frozen pizzas known to man.
I became more and more involved, both in the ticket office and the studio, and by my junior year, I was really hooked. One typically hectic night, Mr. Bluestein pulled me into his classroom, sat me down, and grinned. I was relieved that I wasn’t in trouble, but the grin made me nervous. He said, “You’ve got it now, don’t you? I can tell.” And instantly I knew what he meant. I had sort of fallen in love with the program, and started to realize the things we were doing were pretty incredible.
There are moments in my current job, when there’s a flash of that, when I feel the excitement of having a hand in something bigger than its parts.
And that’s what I want to talk about a little bit tonight. Just by virtue of being involved with the Playhouse, you now know what it’s like to take an idea, a vision, and achieve it, and it’s become like a sense memory for you.
When you’re in college, and then working, you’ll find a lot of people who know what they want to achieve, they have a vision, but don’t really know how to go about it. And that’s what sets you apart, and gives you such an advantage. Certainly the specific skills you’ve learned are impressive, but knowing the feeling of success, and all the grit and determination that goes into it, is now a part of you, and you get to choose how to use it.
It’s something like the nights the play goes really well, and everyone knows it, and you can’t pinpoint one thing that made the difference, because it’s never just one thing, it’s everything gelling together perfectly. And the next night, to make it happen again, it’s somewhat the mechanics of repeating the process, but it’s also easier that night because now you get it, you know how it’s supposed to feel, and you can follow it like a map.
This year when we were having our Election Night rehearsals at MSNBC, I was remembering the rehearsals we’d done for GHS-TV back in 1992. David Hershey was teaching that year, and we were all in awe of him, he was running things over in the studio, and Mr. Bluestein was in C building. We were waiting for the signal to get started, and wondering what the holdup was, when Mr. Bluestein came tearing down the hall, yelling, “Ashley Trevathan, where’s Ashley Trevathan! There’s no one in the copy room, we can’t start without Ashley, somebody find her NOW.” Some poor guy stuck his head out of the ticket office and said, “Actually, she called, she’s stuck at home. Her parents are gone and she has no way to get here.” Well, you can imagine the reaction to that, before I knew it, I’d jumped up, grabbed my keys and run out to my Dad’s car. I wheeled out of the parking spot and heard a loud crunch. When I saw what I’d hit my heart stopped. I’d scraped Mr. Hershey’s beautiful black sports car, the car we all knew was his baby and, at the time, the nicest thing he owned. I kept going, picked up Ashley, made it through rehearsal, and went to the studio to throw myself at Mr. Hershey’s mercy. His reaction was not at all what I expected, he actually laughed and told me it was alright. What a nice guy.
What’s the point to this story? There really isn’t one, I just love that story. No, really, the “trial by fire” experiences that you have here prepare you for whatever you decide you want to do next. And the passion and high standards that Mr. Bluestein demands from all of us become part of this internal compass that we take with us when we go. I was so lucky to work on Brian Williams show -- he also demanded a great level of integrity and focus from his staff, and because of my experiences here I was ready for that.
I’ll also say, the pandemonium of Election Night is universal, Rick Kaplan is now the one screaming in the hallway, but other than that, what you guys did November 2nd is pretty much the same thing we were doing. Although we did have that giant map on the ice rink, and the highlight of my night was when some guy got past security and tried to peel the red off Ohio.
Another great gift this program gave me, a gift that’s kept on giving, is my best friend Mary-Kathryn Chevraux, now Ludwig, who drove all the way from Indiana with her husband and newborn son to be here tonight. When we were in college, at separate schools, she called me up and said she’d gotten an internship at Carnegie Hall in New York, and I should get an internship up there too so we could share a dorm and spend the summer together.
Now Mary-Kathryn has always been daring and embraced change – I’m not as brave as she is, but my experiences at the Playhouse had challenged me, and shown me that taking big chances could mean big payoffs.
We kept a list on our door that summer called “the strangest thing I saw today,” because we started noticing there are an awful lot of weird things to see in New York on a daily basis. There was the guy who jogged around Washington Square Park with a live parrot on his shoulder every morning, the lady who dressed her cats up in pajamas, and the guy in the gym who workout out in his underwear. Mary-Kathryn showed me that the experience itself is an adventure, and you can’t get so caught up in the outcome that you don’t enjoy and soak up the process.
In the job I have now, I sometimes struggle with the need for outside validation, for praise, for someone to affirm what I’ve done. During the Republican convention I produced a series on the streets of New York that I spent a lot of time trying to get just perfect. When “Part One” ran, I was anxious to see what Keith and the senior producers thought of it. But it was so hectic in the control room and at the convention site that no one saw it. I watched as Keith went through scripts and talked to the floor manager, and the folks in the control room worked the phones and yelled at each other, basically paying no attention at all. I was disappointed at first, but then realized that I was happy with it, and I trusted my own opinion.
This place gave me that self-reliance, and a healthy sense of how things are supposed to be, so that even when there’s no outside input, I have an inner barometer that tells me when I’m doing my best, and when I need to push myself a little bit harder.
Pushing yourself harder, and constantly raising the bar is the Playhouse way. I look at what you guys have accomplished over the last few years and it’s astounding. I’m so inspired by the current students and teachers and my fellow alumni who are doing such a variety of interesting things.
We all share this inner compass, this common foundation, but the beauty is you can build anything you want on it.
Being here tonight has been such a privilege. Thank You.
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