School play memories

Thank you for your charming and discerning essay “Confessions of a Teen Tevye,” by David Rambo (June 1), on the transformative and memory-inducing power of the high school play.

I, too, experienced this special magic in 1965, when I had the female lead as Elwood P. Dowd’s dotty sister, Veta Louise, in Briarcliff High School’s production of that perennial favorite “Harvey.”

It was all just as the essay said: the epitome of collaboration, the making of something from nothing, and the swift evolution of quiet fellow students into gifted comedians and, even more important, good friends.

The journey of adolescence is like a classical Greek odyssey, filled with whirlpools of temptation, sirens of popularity and herculean academic efforts. The high school play (or musical, as it often is now) adds a stimulating, creative element -- more inclusive than sports, livelier than pure academics, and richer in life lessons and skills than can ever be imagined by struggling young actors when they first take the stage.

Last summer, after 37 years, my high school class of 1965 held its first reunion. One of the questions in our trivia quiz was: “What were the names of the lead characters in “Harvey,” and who played them?”

Thirty-seven years later, everyone remembered!

Fran Gardner Youssef

Irvine