I got extremely nervous when I was on that damn Pepsi/Franti stage . . .

The FALA Class of 2021
actually asked me to give them
a commencement speech. Which, you know,
is a little weird if you pause to really think about it:
like “give me a speech, Gruber.”
Weird.
Who do I look like?
The Founder & CEO of Toastmasters?

So I got up on stage at the Pepsi Amphitheater on which stage Michael Franti yearly plays (seriously, the people of Flagstaff love Michael Franti;
Mr. Franti, if you read this blog please know that you are seriously
beloved in that city & could probably easily start a cult there . . .)

I’ve never heard Franti live, but my Flagstaff friends say he puts on a helluva show — I believe them.

No cults, please. Please no more cults in America &
I have never been asked to give a commencement speech
before because, well, I say shit like
“Michael Franti could start a cult in Flagstaff”
on a semi-regular basis.
I am not a great orator.

I was not asked to give a commencement speech in 1994.
1994 being the year I graduated from high school in America.
Rolling Meadows, IL, if we wanna get specific.

My graduating class was huge. In the hundreds.
I was a poor student (academically, athletically — which
was all that mattered at my schools). Maybe two of my teachers knew
my name and only a handful of people in the school,
my friends: Lori, Dan, Rob, Stef, Roy, Kevin, Cherie . . .
knew who the fuck I actually was.
In my junior and senior years of high school
I made my first friends who actually accepted me as I was.
Didn’t have to be anyone else around my jr./sr. yr crew.
I am still in touch with many of those people because they were
the first ragtag group of weirdos to love me for me.
Weird comments and all.

I remember, in my graduation year, a lot of this album though I think it came out earlier.

All this to say that in my nervousness,
when I got on Franti’s Pepsi Amphitheater Stage and grasped
the magnitude of what was happening and saw all the fucking people I don’t even know out in the audience and well, reader, I choked.
I panicked. Also, graduation speeches can be real boring.
And I knew one thing, even in my panic:
I will not leave Flagstaff
as the woman who
made graduation more
boring.

So I did what I do in the classroom
when a lesson isn’t quite working,
when the energy feels off, when I feel off:
I improvised. I punted. I thought on my feet — literally, figuratively.
Sure, I might have bombed, sure I might have left out
a ton of the really sweet, sentimental but utterly sincere shit
I had written in about a group of kids I’ve known since they were 12 and I was only 38 & I will be 45 in roughly two weeks.
And while I did give a feminist shout out to my “girls” (they will always be kids to me), what I didn’t say was this: as a woman, in this world, every fucking day you manage to stay alive is a blessing. Shout your age from the rooftops because your age is a badge of courage and survival.

Every. Damn. Time.

So I was not asked to give a commencement speech in 1994
because I had, on a good day, seven friends.
When I got on the stage at graduation, 2021,
I saw hundreds upon hundreds of friends.
There were: Favorite Former students, current students, besties, my sister,
favorite colleagues, Favorite Former colleagues, former neighbors,
parents, people who brought me soup before and during the pandemic.
All I could think in that moment was:
I am so blessed I should sacrifice a fucking bull to Zeus.

And even if I bombed (I haven’t brung myself
to watch it all yet), even if I didn’t say
all the things on my heart please know I delivered
this “unspeech” in an effort to work off all the awkwardness
that is baked into the thick crust of euro-pomp & circumstance
surrounding such rites of passage.

Then I took my sister to Sedona.
Sedona is one of those magical places
where you really, really want to believe in God &
where you can catch some actual fucking peace on earth
even if only in a simple hammock beside Oak Creek on
a Monday because the air conditioning was broken in the room you booked in your hotel on a “last-minute hotel” app.
A hammock by the creek is much better than a hotel room any day. As my sister and I laughed and rocked under the trees, beside the creek, we reminisced about the Matt Foley character, how now, for American Gen-Xers and Millennials like us, a “van down by the river” really doesn’t sound so bad at all.

Sounds like music to my American Working Class ears.

My FALA students, going way back to my first year
at that crazymagic school on the mountain, always
took me on my own terms, and I them.
And I think that’s how so much happened.
So very much happened.
To quote my friend Mike’s final FALA performance,
“Oh boy. Oh boy.”

How do you sum that up in a commencement speech?
How do you say The Truth in ten minutes?
The truth about how Keetra, Kelly, Milo, Noah, Evan, Marlee, Annie, Jerome,“the Ella’s,” Chinle, Julian, et al (my class of 2021) feel
far closer to my heart than the class of 1994 of which I was
a member.

And here’s the whole speech, obligingly uploaded to my YouTube channel because Shakespeare got to get paid, son.