 |
 |
| Kristin Donahue as Dorothy DeLay. |
|
Our daughter
Kristin "became" Dorothy DeLay for her school's annual Wax Museum last March—an
annual event put on by the sixth-graders of Marshall Road Elementary School for
the past 10 years, in which great figures in American history are represented.
She sat (for nearly two hours) as still as a wax person while museum-goers shuffled
by. Other Americans-in-wax included the Wright brothers, Jackie Kennedy, Benjamin
Franklin, and several presidents. Kristin placed her violin and bows in front
of her, and items from her research all around her: an old dress (1890s) in the
style that Dorothy's grandmother would have worn, posters showing Dorothy's hometown
of Medicine Lodge, Kan., and other places she lived, and in the foreground, a
"DeLay-type board" titled "Pointless Practicing? Practice Productively." She learned
of DeLay's positive way of approaching problems with her students' technique,
of how she seldom called students by their given names but rather by her
given names ("honey," "sweetie," and "sugarplum"), and of how those same students
honored her at her memorial service and elsewhere.
Kristin has gone to concerts at the
Aspen Music Festival and, along with her family, collected programs featuring
students of Dorothy DeLay. Some of those programs were included in a "Scrapbook
of My Life" which Kristin prepared for the exhibit. It included photos, excerpts
from a diary, Miss DeLay's passport, and newspaper clippings. This sixth-grade
student really got inside the heart, mind, and soul of Dorothy DeLay, and was
proud to present her life and work to her suburban Washington community (which
included the local papers and the neighbors, as well as schoolmates).
Ruth Donahue
Vienna,
VA
|
