Future Fifth Grade Play

Beren deMotier * writer * artist * human

The Future Fifth Grade Play

It was our daughter’s third grade play the other night. The third grade play at our school is a combination of history, social studies and music written by a visiting artist who is paid with money earned by an event wherein all the children run around the block and get pledges based on how many laps they run, or, in some cases, nice tidy lump sums. There tend to be a few skinned knees, but it works, since without it there is no arts program, and as the whole country learned last year thanks to Doonesbury, we in Oregon barely have a school budget…

That’s a whole other issue.

In third grade the kids study Portland (bridges, stumps, shipbuilding), in fourth grade it will be our state (Native American studies, lots of Lewis and Clark, tragedy-filled Oregon trail diaries with make-believe family members dropping like flies from childbirth and starvation) and in fifth grade they study American history and put on The Fifth Grade Play.

I’ve done this before.

But as I watched the play on Wednesday night, our toddler safe at the home of friends and our twelve year old son for a date as my wife is thousands of miles away in India for three weeks working, I thought to myself, I wonder…

Because besides putting on lively skits with songs about lazy pioneer men (thus the Portland moniker “Stumptown”, they cut down the trees but left the stumps), and one on women’s suffrage that brought down the house, they did a section on the Japanese internment, and one on the Vietnam War. The one focusing on the tragedy of the Japanese who lost their livelihood, homes and lives when they were taken from the west coast and interned inland. The other re-enacting a protest march against the Vietnam War, included a small scale version of the Vietnam War Memorial onstage.

These sections reminded me of the fifth grade play, which always features a breathtaking rendition of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, and emphasizes the civil rights movement. And I wondered, will our kids go to plays like these, as the parents of elementary students themselves, and one of the skits will be about two men or two women getting married? Will school children, in studying American history, cover the Gay Rights Movement, specifically celebrating the decade in which equal rights were finally won with the right to marry?

I think it’s possible.

Massachusetts is marrying same-sex couples, despite great efforts to derail this decision. Multnomah County has stopped issuing marriage licenses, but it’s taken the issue to the legislators, who must make a decision about how to reconcile state law with our state constitution which clearly requires equal rights for same-sex couples. Our Presidential candidates actually discuss same-sex marriage and civil unions in polite terms, and don’t avoid it like the plague, for fear of being tainted by the issue. Even our stridently anti-same-sex marriage President and arch-conservatives are reluctant to paint us as heathens and pedophiles like in decades past.

Almost ten years ago, when our oldest was in preschool, one of the kids asked the preschool teacher, “Can a boy marry a boy?” and our teacher said, “Yes.” She didn’t qualify it, or explain the difference between marriage in the heart, or marriage in the law. What she felt was important was to answer the basic question of whether two men, or two women, could love each other the same as a woman and a man. And the answer was yes.

Young people like those preschool kids, now middle-schoolers, are overwhelmingly more liberal on the subject of gay marriage. And they are growing up fast. The kids I saw onstage singing about votes for women and doing a falsetto version of “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” that made the audience simultaneously wince, smile and tear up, are unlikely to understand what the fuss was all about when they reach voting age in ten year’s time. The millions of children of gays and lesbians are playing soccer and baseball and Barbies with the millions of children of straight families, without the world coming to an end. These playmates are also more likely to favor gay marriage as they grow up, having witnessed firsthand that same-sex couples are no big deal and about as unthreatening as a warm slice of wheat bread.

I see a future in which ten and eleven year olds will dress in drag for the Fifth Grade Play, to mark the Stonewall Riots as the beginning of the gay rights movement, much like Rosa Parks or Malcolm X is portrayed onstage today. I see a ten year old girl in minister get-up, standing in front of two ten year old boys or girls, with a big map of Massachusetts in the background, having the couple repeat vows, exchange rings, and air kiss to a combination of applause and silence such as the Vietnam War protest skit received the other night, not everyone loving it equally.

But it will be part of America’s history, like it or not. I have a dream. I