Speech Night

The future is bright! The students are talented! They win awards! They sing and dance and play their instruments! We clap! Little pockets of extra clapping eddy through the auditorium as particular sons and daughters win awards for being talented! We are excited that they are so talented and the future is so bright! We are lucky to know such talented, bright, futuristic students! We look forward to the time when they rule the world because then the world will be bright and talented and happy like Speech Night! This will be much better than the world we live in now! This will be much better than the world we created! We can’t wait! Grow up you young people! Take your brightness and your talent out into the world and save us from our mistakes! We clap fervently! We clap so many times throughout the night! They tell us to hold off on our clapping until the end of each section! But we want to clap for every bright, talented student! The students who didn’t win awards clap too! They are lucky to be near the bright, talented students! Some of it might rub off! We are all hoping some of it will rub off! (what happened to our lives, where did our talent go, when did our brightness start to fade, who did we let down, how did we fail to be brilliant and make the world a better place, what dreams did we give up on, we sit in the dark for two and a half hours and we clap and underneath our clapping lie the questions we don’t want to ask). That was very good! What bright, talented students they are! Hoorah for their awards! Hang onto it students! Hold tight to your bright talent! Don’t let go! Don’t let us down! Don’t let yourselves down! Stay bright! Stay in the light! Clap! Clap louder! Whoop if you must! (the drive home is quiet, we listen to 80s songs on the radio, we stop at McDonalds, we don’t speak, we have run out of things to say).