Important Dates

Our next meeting will be on May 19, 2010 in Mrs. Gautier's room (209) until 3:15. If you have any questions, please see Mrs. Gautier or Justin Kiefer.

        If you haven’t heard by now, I was recently nominated for a Freddy Award for “Outstanding Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role” for my role as Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof. I must say this is quite an honor; out of over twenty schools that participate in the Freddy Awards, I was one of seven nominees chosen for this category.

        Yes, I was very happy upon seeing my name announced, as anyone would be, but I also felt a little bit of nostalgia. My mind suddenly returned to my days as a freshman here at Belvidere when I was a newcomer to the stage. Those moments of happiness and sorrow, success and failure, and ultimately, belonging, surfaced once again.

        Allow me to explain. Let’s say you move into a new house, and you are tasked with decorating your room. As time goes on, you will move pieces of furniture, hang pictures on your wall, and throw old things out. All of these things are a culmination of who you are up until that point. Much as the items in your room speak volumes about you, so too do the experiences you’ve had in high school.

        When I ponder how many days we have left in this school year, I think about everything I’ve done so far, good or bad. How often do you think about what might have been? What if something had worked out differently? What if you had played sports instead of joining the band? What if you had not told your friend that one secret you had been keeping hidden for so long? How different would your friends have been? How different would you have been?

        They say that in an infinite universe, there are an infinite number of possibilities. Some also believe that there are an infinite number of universes, even ones so similar that the only difference being you wore a green shirt to school instead of a blue one. Others might depart drastically from our own, such as you being the quarterback on the football team as opposed to the lead trumpet in the marching band. In this world of uncertainties, who is to say what might have been?

        However, I don’t want you to think I have any regrets about what I have done. On the contrary, I couldn’t be happier with everything I’ve accomplished up until now. We all think about what might have been, but very rarely do we have the time to experience more than one path. Let’s just be happy that our experiences have been excellent so far.

-Justin Kiefer
Editor, The Scarlet Scoop

“Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back.”

Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken