Mine were brief but cherished moments this week before a sold-out 2,400 high school students, parents, friends, teachers and mentors in the concert hall at the Kennedy Center this week gathered for an annual lovefest known as the Cappies Gala.
Cappies, as AI tells us, stands for Critics and Awards Program for High School Theater. It’s a program where high school theater and journalism students are trained as critics, write reviews of other schools’ productions, and participate in an awards ceremony. The program aims to recognize and celebrate student achievements in high school theater.
The gala is truly an amazing event every year, veritably awash with loud, boisterous and life-affirming teen spirit, ear piercing cheers for nominees as they are announced, winners and the dozen or so production numbers interspersed throughout the three-hour event. (It emulates the Tony Awards that way).
This year there were special tributes to the passing of leaders who’ve kept the program alive and flourishing (copies of the original National Capital Area event are now active in a dozen regional centers all across the U.S. while 46 schools participate in this area), including a man I was honored to know, the recently deceased U.S. Congressman Gerry Connolly of Fairfax County, Virginia, himself a thespian who often partook of small parts in productions by a local drama troupe in his district.
Having done this a number of times now, I always put extra thought into what I might say when coming onto the Cappies Gala stage to play a brief part opening an envelope and announcing a winner in a given category (this year for me it was for lighting). So I said this year, “It is such a joy and privilege to be a part of this every year, to be in the heart of the nation’s heart. Beauty, empathy and human compassion are the very essence of theater, and you students have your whole lives ahead of you to practice these. They are the best weapons against cruelty and indifference.”
It earned a sustained applause, though not as big as the one a few years ago when I said simply, “Happy Pride!” Every year now I enjoy wearing my rainbow lightning pin on my lapel through June Pride months.
Sadly, this time I was the only presenter who represented a news organization of any kind, despite the fact the Cappies were set up 25 years ago to celebrate achievement at the high school level of both theater artists and young writers as critics. All the other presenters this week were school leaders or from arts non-profits.
This reflects the state of a news industry that has been under such attack from Trump, who assails it routinely as “public enemy Number One,” as well as attention-span numbing, cheap and easy online so-called “alternatives” that do not resist but encourage the kind of social segmenting and distancing that is proving a danger to democratic values and practice.
It is something I am dedicated to overcoming for reasons associated with fundamental values. It had a lot to do with the Page One feature I wrote and published in my Falls Church News-Press last week profiling friend and long-time Washington Blade reporter Lou Chibbaro Jr., whose work for that LGBTQ+ community newspaper since 1976 has contributed far more than people may think to shaping an inclusive but cohesive identity for the gay community that as a result is much better poised to resist and counter divisive efforts at ripping us apart and setting us against ourselves.
I have felt this ever since I wrote the first editorial in the very first edition of the Gay Sunshine newspaper in Berkeley, Calif. at the outset of our modern movement in 1971.
In this month, made special this year by the selection of the D.C. to be the locus for a World Pride five-week extravaganza, the celebration is in the shadow of the most dangerous threat since the eruption of the modern LGBTQ+ movement to the freedoms and self-affirmations currently afforded all.
Stand tall for the universal values native to our movement against this angry dark influence.
