Over the years I was drafted into several school plays at Charles Wright when I returned to the school as a teacher. I played a drunken Pole sitting at a bar in Saroyan’s Time of Your Life, directed by Donn Laughlin. With few lines (Laughlin knew my limitations), I had to fill a couple of hours of stage time each night while resisting Lyle Peniston’s ’74 attempts to crack me up. This play was performed in the old bus shed next to the Lower School.

About the same time, I was cast in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, playing a psychiatrist, again with few lines. In the early seventies with stage makeup I could pass for an adult in low light. That play, with stunning lead performances by Kevin O’Rourke ’74, Mary Dupuis, and Don Dobler ’75, was performed on the senior stage in the commons.

My next play was Fiddler on the Roof, where I played a rabbi. I guess that director Ruth Palmerlee spotted a special spiritual quality in me that fit the role. The rest of the world has yet to spot it. That play we didn’t even perform at CWA; we rented the theater at Steilacoom High School.

Most recently I played a cross-dressing drama critic in The Farndale Avenue Housing Estate Townswomen’s Guild Dramatic Society’s Production of Macbeth, directed by John Forier and featuring Andrew Evans. That play was done in what I still call the study hall but is currently the band room.

Of four plays in which I had a part, we were in a real theater only once and that was when we went to Steilacoom. Charles Wright has a proud history of theater, but has never really had the facilities to support the program. This campaign is an exciting time for many of us who over the years remember those great productions in those inadequate spaces. The same could be said for the music program. If they were to beg me to return for just the right role …. Just kidding.

Stoner attends Prescott College in Arizona where he is majoring in education. Creighton King, one of his teachers at Charles Wright, describes him as “state-of-the-art human being… He is the only student I have ever taught who has read widely enough on his own to know the plays of Jean Paul Sartre as well as the novels of Jose Saramago.”

In Stephanie Glenn’s Japanese class, Stoner took on the position of serving tea for his senior project. “This meant lots of study, little old Japanese ladies teaching him how to dress and serve ceremonial tea in full kimono, and all of the polite Japanese language learning to go along with it,” says Glenn. “He has a tremendous amount of poise and confidence.”

Stoner’s winning essay:

It’s near the coast. In a space of sea-salt air and sailboats. It’s a cold day, cloudy. She sits facing inland. She doesn’t hear his approach. They embrace. The embrace is for his sake not hers, though she pretends. She is the first to release. They’re not old friends, though they did love. More than she’ll admit. Slowly, he releases, tracing the backs of her arms to her fingertips letting his hands fall useless into his pockets. They wander the streets. He misses her. They stop and order coffee. Black and midnight strong for him. Iced, blended and sugar-creamed for her. They continue on to the waterfront and sit. He tries to laugh at her jokes and confusion, letting her gossip and pretending to be interested, when really all he wants is to hold her quietly. They live disconnected lives, countless miles and lifetimes away. Their own past remains unspoken while those of strangers fill the air between them. He watches the stark lambency of the blue peter on a nearby ship. I have to go, she says. He nods. Another hurried embrace that she is the first to forget. A fog has set in. He lingers as her car recedes. Soon, the first rains of the season will come to wash away the dust and dirt off the streets. He soon begins to wish he had not let her leave. She crashed on her way home. Dead at seventeen.