- 注册
- 2002-10-07
- 消息
- 402,179
- 荣誉分数
- 76
- 声望点数
- 0
I have finally made it to Denver. After almost two years of planning and preparations, I am at the “Mile High City.” My host parents are very nice. Tomorrow we are going to the rodeo in Cheyenne, Wyoming. It’s kind of funny — not even a day in the state and we are already going out of state. The goodbyes last night and this morning were much easier than I thought they would be. I guess I miss everyone back home but that’s only because I haven’t gotten settled in yet. This year will rock — I know it will!
It’s been 20 years since I wrote that diary entry, which marked the official start of my Up With People year. Earlier that day, I caught a bus to Detroit and then a plane to Denver, where I met the couple who would host me and two other Uppies for the summer: Remco, a serious chap from The Netherlands and Juhana, a jovial, perma-smiling son of Finland.
Ever since I had first heard of Up with People in the fall of 1995 — when it rolled into Woodstock, Ont. with a promise of fulfilling my showbiz dreams — it has never been easy to explain. The leadership-promoting organization, whose roots date back to the 1960s, has evolved considerably over the years. The Up with People I knew involved performing a bright, full-scale musical for audiences on two continents, while also doing community service projects and living with local host families. It did not, to my friends’ chagrin, involve performing at a SuperBowl half-time show and was, thankfully, not quite as squeaky clean as The Simpsons’ Hooray for Everything spoof might lead you to believe.
I travelled in a cast with about 150 other young people between the ages of 18 and 25, plucked from two dozen countries. The musical we performed was created specifically for Up with People and was used as the primary vehicle to drive home the program’s enduring message of peace, unity and understanding among all the world’s people.
Of course, it was cheesy and saccharine. But we didn’t care, not really — performing the show was the price we paid for an unparalleled intercontinental adventure.
We learned the songs and choreography over the summer and hit the road after Labour Day, while the world mourned the recent death of Princess Diana. Stops in too many states to name soon followed as we headed west to California first, than east to North Carolina, arriving a few weeks before Christmas.
We regrouped in January and spent the second term performing in Finland, Sweden, Germany, Belgium and Portugal.
There were side trips, too — a stomach-churning ferry ride across the Gulf of Finland to Tallinn, Estonia; a wrenching visit to the Dachau concentration camp near Munich; a three-day weekend in Paris at the height of World Cup fever.
In a flash, it was all over. Time to get my coat and go home.
Matthew Pearson and some of his castmates.
Years pass so much faster than I ever thought possible.
My 20th Up With People reunion is this weekend. I might have to avoid Facebook for a few days because the pictures will kill me. I wanted to go and had daydreamed about it; had imagined what it would be like to see old friends all these years later.
Well, maybe not exactly friends, but not not friends either. What is the word for people we hold dear but haven’t seen or even talked to for years?
What might I tell them about myself? What might they tell me? In what ways would we surprise each other?
Reunions can bring up stuff for people. I’m not who I thought I’d be, we might tell ourselves. I’m not where I thought I’d be. I haven’t won a Daytime Emmy award or become a YouTube sensation and I don’t manage a travelling Cirque du Soleil show, as some of my cast mates have gone on to do. I haven’t yet written a book or run a marathon.
I am still writing and travelling. My hair is thinning and I don’t like mushrooms. I have a boyfriend and a baby girl who we co-parent with her two moms. All four of us are listed on the birth certificate. That kind of thing is possible in Canada, I’d explain. People call us the Mamas and the Papas.
Everyone is a work in progress, but never moreso than when we are 19 or 20, teetering between adolescence and adulting. Perhaps I wanted to go to the reunion so badly this year because the version of myself I’d present is, at long last, the truest, and I want people to know him because I’m starting to actually like him.
I have been out of the closet now almost as long as I was ever in, and that has required a certain settling into my skin. I’ve seen and done enough to know what I’d like to see more of and what I’m happy not repeating.
Douglas Coupland wrote in one of his early novels that, “Our achievements make us interesting, but our darkness makes us loveable.” I’ve always liked that line — even during my Up With People days. Yet I confess it’s only in recent years that I actually began to understand what he meant.
Yes, achievements can be worth pursuing and some will bring fulfillment or at least make you an interesting dinner party guest. But so too is facing the dark corners of your anxious mind and saying, “I see you. I know you. You’re not so bad.”
To understand that seeing and loving people fully — and letting them see and love you fully — is itself a personal milestone.
This year’s reunion is in Tucson, Ariz. At the risk of getting political, I need to get political for a second — the United States has a president who is, in my mind, the antithesis of everything Up With People was about, even if it was started by some Republicans. I’d love to know how my American friends are reckoning such a difficult truth.
That’s not to say Canada is perfect. I recognize that now far more than I did then. This country was founded by colonialists who believed it was good public policy to round up the Indigenous children, scrub from them their culture and language and, in so doing, created a cascading waterfall of trauma that soaked generation after generation. We didn’t mention that to our fellow castmates on the sunny October afternoon in Arizona when we celebrated Canadian Thanksgiving and made cheery jokes about how we Canucks pronounce “out” and “about.”
Long before our prime minister made it his mantra, it was Up with People that instilled in me the idea that better is always possible, that we can all be richer if we work together, and that none of us is ever truly free if we aren’t all truly free.
These notions continue to shape my politics and my approach to the world.
Up With People also taught me the world is big and fleeting, and that sometimes we probably won’t see or share space again with people who left an indelible mark on us. Much as I might wish it, we will, the people of Cast A, never all be together again in the same room. Some of us left this world too soon, some have left the experience long behind and don’t look back, and others, myself included, just couldn’t swing a midsummer sojourn to sunny Arizona.
I can’t be with you in Tucson, my friends, so I wrote you this letter instead. I didn’t want you to mistake absence for distance. You are never far from my heart, you who dreamed of a better, fairer world and a cleaner, safer planet; you who held your lighter high when we sang “Freiheit” in Germany just as they had after the Berlin Wall fell; you who ran into the ocean in Portugal in your show costume after the curtain fell for the last time, alive to world’s endless possibility.
mpearson@postmedia.com
twitter.com/mpearson78
查看原文...
It’s been 20 years since I wrote that diary entry, which marked the official start of my Up With People year. Earlier that day, I caught a bus to Detroit and then a plane to Denver, where I met the couple who would host me and two other Uppies for the summer: Remco, a serious chap from The Netherlands and Juhana, a jovial, perma-smiling son of Finland.
Ever since I had first heard of Up with People in the fall of 1995 — when it rolled into Woodstock, Ont. with a promise of fulfilling my showbiz dreams — it has never been easy to explain. The leadership-promoting organization, whose roots date back to the 1960s, has evolved considerably over the years. The Up with People I knew involved performing a bright, full-scale musical for audiences on two continents, while also doing community service projects and living with local host families. It did not, to my friends’ chagrin, involve performing at a SuperBowl half-time show and was, thankfully, not quite as squeaky clean as The Simpsons’ Hooray for Everything spoof might lead you to believe.
I travelled in a cast with about 150 other young people between the ages of 18 and 25, plucked from two dozen countries. The musical we performed was created specifically for Up with People and was used as the primary vehicle to drive home the program’s enduring message of peace, unity and understanding among all the world’s people.
Of course, it was cheesy and saccharine. But we didn’t care, not really — performing the show was the price we paid for an unparalleled intercontinental adventure.
We learned the songs and choreography over the summer and hit the road after Labour Day, while the world mourned the recent death of Princess Diana. Stops in too many states to name soon followed as we headed west to California first, than east to North Carolina, arriving a few weeks before Christmas.
We regrouped in January and spent the second term performing in Finland, Sweden, Germany, Belgium and Portugal.
There were side trips, too — a stomach-churning ferry ride across the Gulf of Finland to Tallinn, Estonia; a wrenching visit to the Dachau concentration camp near Munich; a three-day weekend in Paris at the height of World Cup fever.
In a flash, it was all over. Time to get my coat and go home.
Matthew Pearson and some of his castmates.
Years pass so much faster than I ever thought possible.
My 20th Up With People reunion is this weekend. I might have to avoid Facebook for a few days because the pictures will kill me. I wanted to go and had daydreamed about it; had imagined what it would be like to see old friends all these years later.
Well, maybe not exactly friends, but not not friends either. What is the word for people we hold dear but haven’t seen or even talked to for years?
What might I tell them about myself? What might they tell me? In what ways would we surprise each other?
Reunions can bring up stuff for people. I’m not who I thought I’d be, we might tell ourselves. I’m not where I thought I’d be. I haven’t won a Daytime Emmy award or become a YouTube sensation and I don’t manage a travelling Cirque du Soleil show, as some of my cast mates have gone on to do. I haven’t yet written a book or run a marathon.
I am still writing and travelling. My hair is thinning and I don’t like mushrooms. I have a boyfriend and a baby girl who we co-parent with her two moms. All four of us are listed on the birth certificate. That kind of thing is possible in Canada, I’d explain. People call us the Mamas and the Papas.
Everyone is a work in progress, but never moreso than when we are 19 or 20, teetering between adolescence and adulting. Perhaps I wanted to go to the reunion so badly this year because the version of myself I’d present is, at long last, the truest, and I want people to know him because I’m starting to actually like him.
I have been out of the closet now almost as long as I was ever in, and that has required a certain settling into my skin. I’ve seen and done enough to know what I’d like to see more of and what I’m happy not repeating.
Douglas Coupland wrote in one of his early novels that, “Our achievements make us interesting, but our darkness makes us loveable.” I’ve always liked that line — even during my Up With People days. Yet I confess it’s only in recent years that I actually began to understand what he meant.
Yes, achievements can be worth pursuing and some will bring fulfillment or at least make you an interesting dinner party guest. But so too is facing the dark corners of your anxious mind and saying, “I see you. I know you. You’re not so bad.”
To understand that seeing and loving people fully — and letting them see and love you fully — is itself a personal milestone.
This year’s reunion is in Tucson, Ariz. At the risk of getting political, I need to get political for a second — the United States has a president who is, in my mind, the antithesis of everything Up With People was about, even if it was started by some Republicans. I’d love to know how my American friends are reckoning such a difficult truth.
That’s not to say Canada is perfect. I recognize that now far more than I did then. This country was founded by colonialists who believed it was good public policy to round up the Indigenous children, scrub from them their culture and language and, in so doing, created a cascading waterfall of trauma that soaked generation after generation. We didn’t mention that to our fellow castmates on the sunny October afternoon in Arizona when we celebrated Canadian Thanksgiving and made cheery jokes about how we Canucks pronounce “out” and “about.”
Long before our prime minister made it his mantra, it was Up with People that instilled in me the idea that better is always possible, that we can all be richer if we work together, and that none of us is ever truly free if we aren’t all truly free.
These notions continue to shape my politics and my approach to the world.
Up With People also taught me the world is big and fleeting, and that sometimes we probably won’t see or share space again with people who left an indelible mark on us. Much as I might wish it, we will, the people of Cast A, never all be together again in the same room. Some of us left this world too soon, some have left the experience long behind and don’t look back, and others, myself included, just couldn’t swing a midsummer sojourn to sunny Arizona.
I can’t be with you in Tucson, my friends, so I wrote you this letter instead. I didn’t want you to mistake absence for distance. You are never far from my heart, you who dreamed of a better, fairer world and a cleaner, safer planet; you who held your lighter high when we sang “Freiheit” in Germany just as they had after the Berlin Wall fell; you who ran into the ocean in Portugal in your show costume after the curtain fell for the last time, alive to world’s endless possibility.
mpearson@postmedia.com
twitter.com/mpearson78
查看原文...
