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| Photo by Daria Romanova via Wikimedia Commons |
by Peggy Robin
It’s graduation season, and so you may well be sitting right
now amid a sea of parents, completely tuned out as some speaker (more likely
selected for size of contribution to the Annual Fund than contribution to the
good of society) piles cliché upon cliché, giving no sense that the speech is
building toward its conclusion. You hope you are being discreet as you peruse
your email on your smartphone. Here’s a bit of light reading that might get you
through it. The pieces below are all appropriate to the occasion -- charming --
but not laugh-out-loud funny:
Here’s Stephen Colbert’s address last year at the University
of Virginia’s graduation:
Here’s a whole batch of video speeches - the one I suggest
you play is Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s to Mount Holyoke grads:
http://mashable.com/2014/05/16/funny-graduation-speeches/
If you’re in a crowd, wear earbuds -- and keep them on if you play the video
that’s number ten on that page, from the kid who was valedictorian at West Hall
High School in 2010, showing how high school is like a Rubik’s Cube.
If you haven’t read the mother of all quotable graduation
speeches, it’s Mary Schmich’s 1997 “Wear Sunscreen”:
…and its many parodies:
Speaking of parodies of classic graduation speeches, here’s
a recent addition to the canon, from this week’s New Yorker blog:
But for my money, no one has yet topped Woody Allen’s
contribution to the genre -- from 1979:
I hope one of the above at least kept you from falling
asleep….or worse, snoring.
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Still Life With Robin is published on the Cleveland ParkListserv and on All Life Is Local on Saturdays.
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