Last night saw the opening of this year's Seattle Chamber Music Society summer festival, the first of 14 nights of music during the month of July. St. Nicholas Hall at the Lakeside School was sold out for the performance of trios by Debussy, Beethoven, and Shostakovich. Many non-paying music lovers also stretched out on the lawns outside the Hall, picnicking and listening to the performance inside through speakers provided for their enjoyment.
Now in its 26th season, the festival features internationally recognized players from orchestras, chamber groups, and college faculties across the United States and from abroad.
Besides the exceptionally good music, one of the pleasures of the festival is the opportunity to spend warm summer evenings on the Lakeside campus, and -- for some of us, at least -- to fantasize that we had spent our high school years in this halcyon environment.
I myself breezed through high school in a Northwest logging community. Until I arrived at college, as a freshman, I trusted that I had been well educated. After my first week of college, I realized that my high school had somehow overlooked teaching me how to think. One fourth of my fellow freshman were from prep schools, mostly East Coast. They had the self-assurance, at least on the surface, of young people who were simply climbing up, in a natural progression, one more rung on the ladder of critical thinking. They were not still trying to figure out how that ladder itself was constructed!
As a small town, Pacific Northwest kid, I really can't see myself as having ever fit in to the social milieu of Choate, Exeter or St. Paul's. But Lakeside, which I discovered after moving to Seattle following college, seems to offer much the same academic rigor, but more accessibly and with closer ties to the local community. Its student body, at least today, is coed, non-residential, diverse and inclusive. Its teams play in the same athletic conferences as other local high schools.
According to the school's website, the assistant headmaster described this year's graduating class as "variant," which was defined as:
a group of young people, who, in addition to their many talents and successes, has shown a certain quirky predilection for varying from the norm and a tendency toward change. "When I think about the variability in the sum of the 127 seniors in this class," Mr. Healy said, "all of whom are independent, distinct, and most of whom have experienced bouts of randomness, I really do think that 'Variants Add.'"
I think I would have loved it.
Lakeside has its claims to fame. A couple of geeky classmates -- Bill Gates and Paul Allen -- went on to a measure of success in the computer software industry. And the campus now sports prominently a Gates-Allen Hall as testimony to the happy fact that you don't need to be a football hero to be remembered fondly by your alma mater.
Literature has yet to do for Lakeside what John Knowles did for Phillip's Exeter in A Separate Peace. But the most atmospheric description of Lakeside from an outsider's perspective that I've read to date is from Tobias Wolff's memoir, This Boy's Life (Leonardo DiCaprio starred in the movie version). Young Wolff came to Seattle from his small town high school to take the SAT-like test for admission to private high schools, a test that was administered on the Lakeside campus.
After lunch I walked around the campus. The regular students had not yet returned from their Christmas vacation, and the quiet was profound. I found a bench overlooking the lake. The surface was misty and gray. Until they rang the bell for the math test I sat with crossed legs and made believe I belonged here, that these handsome old buildings, webbed with vines of actual ivy to which a few brown leaves still clung, were my home.
And in summer, it only gets better. Is there perhaps an element of snobbishness in wishing I'd had the opportunity to attend a private high school, and one so beautiful? I hope not, and I think not. My wistful yearning isn't a wish that I'd been viewed as somehow "better" than others, but a regret that the education that commenced for me in college had not begun four years earlier, back when I know I was ready, and open to it. Lakeside School is a beautiful campus, but so actually was my own high school, the architectural styles of the two being uncannily similar. The beauty I missed before I was 18 was the intellectual beauty of working with an excellent faculty and of associating with bright students who might have shared and sharpened some of my own interests during those four formative years.
Such were my musings, walking about campus before the performance and during intermission. Thanks to the Seattle Chamber Music Society, not only for its nights of stirring chamber music, but also for once more giving us the excuse to walk about this interesting and beautiful school, a school that continues to produce outstanding graduates.
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