There were whiteout conditions. The wind howled along the knife’s-edge ridgeline, as the boot prints of science teacher Michael Heald were disappearing into the snow. Heald and his wife had planned to go rock climbing on the cliffs around Mont Blanc in 2006, but 4 inches of snow was expected that night, forcing them to return to the station. When they reached it, however, service had stopped due to the strong winds, and they slept two nights in that cable car station’s hallway.
Teachers at UPrep have stories to tell. They range from being discovered by two dance teachers in Gillette, Wyoming, to working in the circus, to living in the New York music scene of the 2000’s, and more. Puma Prints decided to ask a handful of teachers to tell those stories.
History teacher Raj Bhat brought a story of his time working as a ticketer for the Cirque Du Soleil in 1990. He joined them on their first U.S. tour as a summer job and followed them down the coast to Santa Monica pier in California, where he kept working with them through early 1991.
“I will say they were a really, really fun bunch of people to work with. They were full of life, full of fun. They were having a great time,” Bhat said of his experience.
Dance teacher Jess Klein quickly found a passion for dance in her childhood, and moved to Gillette, Wyoming in seventh grade. She told the story of how she continued in dance from an unlikely strip mall cul-de-sac as her brother was shopping.
“I was bored out of my mind, of course, with picking out Andy’s bike, so I just decided to go to the parking lot and dance because of the free spirit that I am,” Klein said. “These two women approached me… They were like, ‘We want to invite you to audition for our performing arts academy,’ and I thought, ‘Wow I guess I got discovered in the parking lot, Mom!’ So anyways, I then auditioned, and I got in.”
Orchestra teacher and violist Thane Lewis has done a lot of freelance work and played in many orchestras, but he told a short story about substituting for a violist in an orchestra, and learning the part on a time crunch.
“It was a string quintet, and there’s a big solo for viola. So just four players subbing. Because I [only] watched it twice rehearsed, I practiced for probably 20 hours on this thing,” Lewis said. “[The opener] picked up the phone talking to backstage. They’re gonna start. Hangs up the phone, looks at me. He says ‘Don’t [mess] up’… and then ‘One, two, three, four’ start of the piece, and he was smiling and people laughed, but intense.”
English teacher Susie Mortensen told of how she and her family were two weeks into a summer canoeing trip in Ontario when she was young, and a particular story that has shaped her outlook on life.
“We were going down this river and it turned to mud, and we had to pull our canoes a long way, and their bugs were really bad,” Mortensen said. “But my parents kept singing the entire time, and that was kind of the deal. They like to do really hard things, and then teach us to have a positive disposition, even when things were unpleasant.”
English teacher Carl Faucher told a story about his time in the New York City music scene. He related his experiences to the new movie A Complete Unknown and how it captured how he “felt as a young person living in Greenwich Village in New York City.”
“I played some of the same places that Bob Dylan played,” Faucher said, recounting his time there. “It was really fun to be a part of that, it felt very energizing… There’s an interplay between creativity and performance, and that doesn’t happen in a vacuum.”