On Crystal’s new job, Grace’s covid-riddled musical, prom, Sophie at the Tabernacle organ, and the most romantic anniversary celebration imaginable (vol xxvi, no. 5)

Dear Family,

Crystal got a new job this month.

It’s not that Crystal’s 18-month stint as a para-educator hasn’t had its thrills. And I am sure she is looking forward to her final two weeks of helping her little cadre of (mostly) boys on the autism spectrum navigate the treacherous waters of middle school. But she was nonetheless delighted to learn that she will be working as a full-fledged special education teacher beginning in the fall.

She will not technically qualify for this position until she completes her masters program at Hopkins (hopefully next year) but, like seemingly every other employer in America right now, the school district is short on staff and apparently willing to temporarily accept a partially credentialed teacher.

Crystal will teach at the same middle school in Gaithersburg⁶ where she has been para-educating. She is replacing the teacher she has worked most closely with, who is moving away. Crystal tolerates the long commute because she likes the school, especially its high-functioning autism program.

“High-functioning autism,” I am told, is the proper way of referring to what virtually everybody refers to as “Asperger’s syndrome,” which apparently is not actually a thing. Or is no longer actually a thing.⁷ But whatever it’s called, Crystal has a soft spot for kids who have it.

I imagine the next year will be complicated for Crystal as she balances her degree program with full-time teaching and a demanding church calling. But she’s game for it. You’ll be happy to know that I am doing my part to be supportive by occasionally making the bed, trying to remember to run and empty the dishwasher, and not complaining when she gets the bag-o-salad from Trader Joe’s with shredded kale in it, even though it’s gross.

Grace, the school play, covid, and prom

I understand that when the Northwood High School administration (maybe it was just the principal — it’s hard to fact-check these things when the only available source is your kid) became aware of some of the “mature” content in this year’s spring musical, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, the drama department was instructed to produce two versions of the show. The original version was to be designated for “mature audiences” while a cleaned-up version was created for “general audiences.”

Producing two independent versions of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (Yeah, I’d never heard of it either. To quote Mom, “Why does Grace’s school do all these obscure shows?” I don’t know, Mom. Parents don’t pick the shows.) with two completely separate casts turned out to be serendipitous. I don’t have the precise statistics, but it would seem that approximately 99 percent of Grace’s school came down with covid this month. This took out several cast members, which left many of the remaining students who somehow managed to test negative throughout the final run up to do both versions of the show.

The lucky survivors included Grace, who played Rona Peretti, the real estate agent/former spelling bee champion who basically runs the whole operation. (Grace also portrayed the mother of one of the spellers, which necessitated some quick on-stage wardrobe changes.) Though she wound up performing in both productions, Grace, for reasons I do not understand, was originally cast in the “mature” version.

“Mature” isn’t really the right adjective as the humor was rather sophomoric.⁸ I didn’t see the version for “general audiences,” but I’m guessing it probably omitted some of the blasphemy, other cursing (which was fairly mild), and the Act II song sung by a character lamenting his unfortunately timed erection. It was just risqué enough that we did not feel comfortable inviting friends from church. But some of them found out and came anyway. I’m pretty sure they enjoyed it.

The show ran the weekend after prom, which, in hindsight, was probably a super-spreader event.

Grace went with a group of friends and by all accounts had a nice time. All of the prom prep happened at a friend’s house and so Crystal wasn’t able to take any pictures. But Grace was kind enough to release this one.

Grandma Carolyn and the temple

Grace’s appearance in the school musical was enough to lure Grandma Carolyn across the country from her home in Wenatchee, Washington. She did not seem too put out by the salty language and naturally concurred with the local grandparents’ purely objective assessment that Grace did an outstanding job.

Grandma naturally also wanted to check out the temple open house, and so she did.

I am not in the photo above because I was not there. But I did get a chance to spend a day earlier this month in the welcome tent. (If the angle of the photo were a little wider, you’d be able to see the tent off to the left.) I was assigned to work there as a “language specialist.”

Mine was a highly technical job, obviously entrusted only to the ablest volunteers. It consisted almost entirely of smiling and welcoming people right after they passed through the metal detectors and bag inspection. My stated purpose was to show people looking for tour information in languages other English how to find it. The idea was for the language table to be staffed by two Spanish speakers and two speakers of other languages. And so naturally on my day, we had three French speakers and one Romanian speaker.

No one really needed our help, but it was fun to be able to smile and say “Welcome to the temple” a couple thousand times. Sometimes I’d say it in French to little kids, who thought it was cool. Other times I’d say it in French to adults, who would pretend not to think it was cool (even though in reality I know they did — they must have — you might not know it, but I can actually be quite charming when I want to be). When I thanked people for coming (in English), the most common response by far was some variation of, “Thank you so much for inviting us. We’ve wanted to do this for years.” Everyone seemed so happy to be there. It was a lovely, lovely thing that just made me feel good inside.

Sophie and crowd control

It occurs to me that my volunteer days at the temple were giving me a taste of what Sophie gets to experience almost every day on Temple Square.

She continues to give every indication of being happy in her work there. This is true even when life throws her curve balls and President and Sister Nelson unexpectedly invite 22,000 young adults to a worldwide devotional at the conference center. “Nobody cleared this with me,” observed Sophie, who had her p-day unexpectedly shortened to help prepare for and usher the event. (The worldwide devotional had been planned for some time, obviously. But the decision to invite every young adult within an hour of Salt Lake to come watch it in person was a last-minute thing and apparently involved, among other things, the procurement of more than 40,000 cookies.)⁹

Sometimes the surprises are pleasant, like when she finally got to play the Tabernacle organ. Someone took a few photos which, for some reason, Sophie was asked not to post on social media. But she sent them to me, and nobody asked me not to post them to social media.

And, you know, not to split hairs or anything, but this is not social media. This is a web page.

Twenty-eight years

Crystal and I celebrated our 28th wedding anniversary on Saturday in the most romantic way possible — by seeing the 3:40 showing of “Top Gun: Maverick” and then disagreeing on where to go for dinner.

It was our first time in a movie theater since before the pandemic. It had been so long that I’d somehow forgotten that with all the annoying commercials and previews for stupid movies I’m never going to see, a 3:40 show doesn’t actually begin until sometime after 4. This of course enraged me — the start of each successive preview made me angrier and angrier — and by the time the actual movie started I was ready to start throwing things.

It took all of about 5 seconds of the Top Gun Anthem while the screen was still black to bring me out of my funk. Just the percussive tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a… before the beautifully cheesy 1980s electric guitar solo takes over¹⁰ — before even the first words appeared on the screen — was all I needed to be happy again.

The next two hours were pure bliss. The film’s marketing encourages you to see it on the biggest screen you can. As usual, we succumbed to the marketing (we saw it in IMAX). Not as usual, the marketing was actually pretty good advice. Not to oversell it or anything, and I don’t know if there’s technically such a thing as a perfect movie, but this comes close. One pleasure-inducing Easter egg after another. The whole movie actually is one giant Easter egg. You’d think that might get tedious. But, like the six-pound milkshakes at Chick & Ruth’s Delly in Annapolis (a quarter-mile from the Naval Academy, coincidentally) it somehow doesn’t. It probably has something to do with my age and the fact that I’ve seen the original one roughly 80 billion times (seriously, feed me any line from the first movie and I’ll give you the next three) but this one has literally everything anyone could have hoped for (other than Goose somehow coming back from the dead, and it even sort of has that).

(For dinner, we ultimately landed on a Japanese place we both like across the street from the theater. It was good but ultimately made for kind of a late night — by the time we got home it was nearly 8:30!)

I feel fortunate to have been able to spend 28 of the 36 years between Top Gun movies married to Crystal. She has made the time fly by.

We are mostly happy here and hope you are as well.

Love,
Tim

1. Gaithersburg, or maybe it's Germantown; it doesn't really matter -- it's one of those upcounty places I find myself unable to refer to without adding "way the heck out in" in front of it
2. According to the internet, the latest version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the DSM-5, released in 2013, lumped a bunch of previously differentiated autistic conditions (of which Asperger's was one) into one big thing called "Autism Spectrum Disorder." And so, when Crystal wants to sound like she knows what she is talking about, she refers to the kids she works with as having high-functioning autism. But when she wants people to actually understand what she is talking about, she calls it the Asperger's program. Because everybody knows what that means, and leave it to psychiatry to muddy up an already highly misunderstood condition by messing around with what to call it.
3. I don't necessarily use this term pejoratively. I generally like sophomoric humor, but a lot of it was dumb even by my standards.
4. As I am no longer a "young adult," I did not watch the devotional livestream. But I did subsequently read the transcript, which re-confirmed to me something I have believed for some time: that Russell M. Nelson, in addition to being a prophet, might just be the most amazing 97 year old who has ever lived.
5. For reasons I'm still trying to figure out, I actually like '80s music more now than I did in the '80s
6. Gaithersburg, or maybe it’s Germantown; it doesn’t really matter — it’s one of those upcounty places I find myself unable to refer to without adding “way the heck out in” in front of it
7. According to the internet, the latest version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the DSM-5, released in 2013, lumped a bunch of previously differentiated autistic conditions (of which Asperger’s was one) into one big thing called “Autism Spectrum Disorder.” And so, when Crystal wants to sound like she knows what she is talking about, she refers to the kids she works with as having high-functioning autism. But when she wants people to actually understand what she is talking about, she calls it the Asperger’s program. Because everybody knows what that means, and leave it to psychiatry to muddy up an already highly misunderstood condition by messing around with what to call it.
8. I don’t necessarily use this term pejoratively. I generally like sophomoric humor, but a lot of it was dumb even by my standards.
9. As I am no longer a “young adult,” I did not watch the devotional livestream. But I did subsequently read the transcript, which re-confirmed to me something I have believed for some time: that Russell M. Nelson, in addition to being a prophet, might just be the most amazing 97 year old who has ever lived.
10. For reasons I’m still trying to figure out, I actually like ’80s music more now than I did in the ’80s