Inspiring The Children

Yesterday was the last day of the Vivienne Westwood exhibition, and while it is sad to realize it will now exist only in memory, we couldn't have hoped for things to have gone any better. We got lots of press coverage (way more than any previous graduate exhibition), the gallery was always full, and all the events we planned were rousingly successful.

That includes the event that I was dreading the most-- our Saturday presentation for 90 high school students. FIT has a pre-college program for middle and high school students who are interested in fashion, and for the last few years they had graduate students come in to do a presentation about their exhibition. Since my pre-exhibition duties were tapering off, I signed up to be on the team to plan the presentation. When the head of pre-college programs at FIT came to visit our class, we were shocked to have her say bluntly, "This presentation has not gone well in the past. We are giving it one last try with you guys, but if it doesn't go well we probably won't partner with grad studies again." *Gulp*

It sounded like part of the problem had been that the presentations in the past had sort of been thrown together at the last minute (not surprising considering the pressures of the exhibition), but it also sort of sounded like the thing was cursed. Past disasters had included 1) the main presenter getting horribly ill and someone who was unprepared taking over, 2) the one person with the correct power point getting horribly ill and not showing up, and 3) loss of power to the entire building. Despite having a designated back-up speaker and preparing three different back-up formats of the presentation, I didn't sleep very well the night before.

In the end, it all ran pretty smoothly. It took us a while to set up the projector, but since we had arrived two hours early, we figured it out in good time. We all dressed up 80s (we were told the kids would love that), energetically gave our presentation, divided them into groups, gave three rotations of three different tours, and then sent them on their way. I was sweating through my polyester lace top the whole time. The thing was, the kids were totally hard to read. They sort of just stared at us and didn't really react with excitement or annoyance with anything we said. Their blank faces could have been hiding any emotion from seething hatred to blissful enjoyment. Everything went according to plan, but we were left asking each other, "that went well right? Do you think that went well?" At the end of the day we went to pick our bags up in the Pre-college programs office, a few of the staff members asked, "how do you think it went?" I think we all wanted to scream, I DON'T KNOW YOU TELL US.

A few weeks later we got a glowing e-mail from the program head saying we had broken the curse and it was a great success. Ah, teenagers.