The Creek Mystique

My college-age kids have thrived not just from their natural abilities and parental love and support but because of a special place called Cherry Creek High School. My wife and I moved to Colorado twenty-one years ago specifically so I could teach at Creek, a school filled with opportunities for every way that kids manifest their individual gifts. I’ve served numerous roles at Cherry Creek, including administrator and GT Coordinator, and I can’t imagine a better place to work and send our kids.

For years, my office was the contact point for prospective Creek families. In meetings I always told parents and future students, “Every kid can find their niche at Cherry Creek, because we have every niche.” For example, when my son was a freshman, a group of his friends went into the Activities Office and asked “when does the Dungeon & Dragons Club meet?” We didn’t even know D&D had become popular again, and that first year just seven kids met weekly in the Activities workroom. The club has grown to 120-plus kids, and on Friday afternoons, the IC Lounge is packed with raucous game playing

Sometimes Creek is a place where kids discover who they are, and it might not be who they thought they were. Last year at graduation, Ben Parris spoke passionately, humorously, and self-deprecatingly about how he came to Creek ready to become a championship golfer. During freshman year he realized, with some blunt advice from his coach, that he wouldn’t make the cut. From that setback Ben found his home among our Emmy-winning sports broadcasting program. Ben is now thriving on the air at ASU, and while Ben will never play in the Masters or US Open, I won’t be surprised to someday hear him broadcasting the events for ESPN.

Years ago a young man named Frank Swann came into our fine arts program as a freshman and started working in the sound booth. After studying technical theater at NYU, he went on to become Production Manager for a new Broadway show called Hamilton. Another gifted Creek grad from the music program, Austin Wintory, won a Grammy award for his musical score of the video game Journey. Jesse Aaronson, a 2014 grad, just finished his first Broadway role in Tom Stoppard’s Tony-Award-winning play Leopoldstadt. You see, Cherry Creek is where ideas are hatched, passions are discovered, talents are cultivated, and dreams come true.

Of course, not everyone will or should become an award-winning this or that. Everyone should, however, become the best version of themselves. That happens everyday at Cherry Creek. Students go on to become successful engineers, accountants, dentists, community organizers, and teachers. Rebekah Lee was a gifted language student who was awarded our Future Teacher Scholarship. She then came back to student teach at Creek, and we hired her because we don’t let go of talent when it wants to come home.

And many Bruins do. Dozens of alums work there, like Matt Weiss, a Teacher of the Year and founder of our award-winning broadcasting crew. Assistant Principal Dr. Keogh was a Meistersinger during her years at Creek. This year at the winter concert, I had the joy of seeing her go on stage and sing with her daughter Maddie who is now a Meistersinger and talented dancer with our state championship Poms team.

The basic description of Creek is a comprehensive public high school, a neighborhood school. And you might think, they’re not a performing arts school. Then you go to plays, musicals, and choir, band, or orchestra concerts and you realize, we kinda are. You might think, they’re not an elite sports academy. Then you walk down trophy hall, and realize, we kinda are. You could say, they’re not a STEM magnet. Then you see our robotics program, math team, cybersecurity club, independent science research, and national science fair achievers, and you realize, we kinda are.

It has been an honor, a privilege, and a joy to work at and send our kids to Cherry Creek. After thirty-one years in education and two decades under the Creek Mystique, it’s now time for me to move on. I moved to Greenwood Village for Cherry Creek, and it has been everything I hoped for and more. It’s always bittersweet to walk away, but I will forever look back with fond memories, and like we say, “Once a Bruin, Always a Bruin.”

Can You See Yourself?

If we know any person well in this world, it should be ourselves. I’m sure that after fifty-four years on this planet, I should have a pretty good idea of who I am, what I believe, and how I want to live. Yet, in looking back over my life, I realize that a complete lack of self awareness has been my most obvious trait. Interestingly, that’s not an uncommon characteristic in the contemporary age.

In the first act of Shakespeare’s “The Tragedy of Julius Caesar,” the lead conspirator Cassius speaks to Marcus Brutus, trying to convince him to join the plan to assassinate Caesar. As the two men cautiously measure their words, feeling out the other’s inclinations, Cassius asks “Tell me, good Brutus, can you see your face?” It’s a rather poetic way of suggesting Brutus might not acknowledge who he really is and what he really thinks, especially in regards Caesar’s growing threat to the republic Brutus so dearly loves. In theater the heart of tragedy is often when a character comes face-to-face with his true identity, which can be inspiring or crushing.

The challenge to know and acknowledge our true identity is at the heart of all existential questions about the meaning of life and individual lives. Often our true identity is more clear to others than to ourselves. For much of my life, other people have held up a mirror to my face and subtly or bluntly showed me who I am. Similar to Cassius clarifying to Brutus his vexations, friends have basically said, “Since you know you cannot see yourself, so well as by reflection, I, your glass, will modestly discover to yourself that of yourself which you yet know not of.”

For example, I went to college to be a history teacher, never knowing my true passion was the art of language and the teaching of writing. I used to meet friends outside the English building where they took a poetry class together. We’d play hacky sack and frisbee and listen to John play guitar. “You should take this poetry class,” they told me. “You’d like it.” Though I initially scoffed, I eventually took the class and another from the same professor.

The following semester over beers one night, my roommates said, “You talk about your English classes all the time, but you never mention your history classes. Why aren’t you an English major?” I stared at them dumbfounded, then changed my major the next day. Like many English teachers, I spent my early years as an aspiring novelist, to no avail. Fortunately, I later found success in the nonfiction world, which has produced the bulk of my writing. It took my friend Daniel saying, “You know, you have a lot of success publishing nonfiction, yet you always write fiction. Why do you think you’re a novelist?”

Even my wife pointed out to me in our late twenties that I actually did want to get married and have kids. It wasn’t that she wanted something I didn’t. She just wasn’t going to waste time in a relationship that didn’t have common goals. As it turns out, we are each other’s one and only, and our family has been my greatest blessing. Amusingly, our friends in college knew we’d become a couple long before it occurred to us – they asked to be invited to our wedding long before we ever dated. Self awareness can be elusive.

Often people identify themselves by their jobs, though it’s a weak substitute for identity. What we do is not who we are, and the distinction between action and identity is a tricky one. In a world where work hours are less defined by the punching of a clock, the notion of identity linked to jobs is increasingly complicated. I often ask the kids in my class, “Are you a student?” While they think they spend most of their time in school, the reality is that that school is, in many ways, a small part of who they are.

In numerology, 2024 is an “eight year,” meaning the numbers add up to eight. Eight years are years to “take action” and become who you really are. This year may be the time to finally get up and on to whatever comes next in our lives. I still recall my dad saying, even in his fifties, “I still don’t know what I want to do when I grow up.” I know the feeling.

Gregg Deal Combines Punk and Indigenous Activism With New Band Dead Pioneers

So excited to write about this band for my first published piece in Westword:

With his new musical project, Dead Pioneers, Indigenous activist Gregg Deal wants to remind listeners that “We Were Punk First.” A nationally acclaimed visual artist and spoken-word performer, Deal recently filmed the band’s video for its single “Bad Indian” at Seventh Circle Music Collective, the DIY live-music space in west Denver. Following Dead Pioneers’ indie self-titled album release in September, the band performed at the Skylark in mid-January alongside Cheap Perfume and Elegant Everyone, and after just a few shows, Dead Pioneers is already generating serious local and national buzz.
“I accidentally started a band,” Deal says. Working with guitarist Josh Rivera and drummer Shane Zweygardt, friends from the local music and arts scene, Deal's original plan was to simply integrate punk riffs with his spoken word for his performance-art piece The Punk Pan-Indian Romantic Comedy. But he inadvertently became a songwriter through that experience, and took the first step toward forming a band in early 2021 after meeting Lee Tesch, lead guitarist for the American-English punk band Algiers during an artist residency at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in Florida. While planning a poetry reading for the community, Deal and Tesch wound up in the studio and recorded a six-minute version of “Bad Indian.”

Back in Colorado, Deal shared that recording with Rivera and Zweygardt, and they quickly realized they might have something special. “As we tried to figure out next steps,” Deal says, “we got so caught up in it that I just started writing.” After raising enough money to bring everyone together in Fort Collins, Deal partnered with the Music District, which donated rehearsal space, and Dead Pioneers was born.

.... for the rest of the piece check out the story in Westword

Understanding Abstraction

Whenever someone looks at a piece of abstract art and says, “Well, I could have done that,” my immediate response is a blunt, direct “No, you couldn’t have.” I stand by that assertion despite bemused and annoyed counterarguments, and I explain that the primary reason they couldn’t have done it is quite simply because they didn’t do it. Art doesn’t happen by accident or without intentionality. Art, even seemingly chaotic pieces of abstract expressionism, is not just a disorganized collection of color and lines.

Sometimes people who look at abstract art dismissively deride it even more harshly by saying “my six-year-old kid could do that.” I respond with my same direct answer. “No, they couldn’t.” There’s a clear distinction between intentional pieces of abstract art and the whimsical play of a child. Abstract art is guided by concepts such as geometry, color theory, contrast, relationship, light, shade, and meaning. That concept of meaning is what often gives viewers pause. But, in fact, the movement is called abstract “expressionism” for a reason. The artist is most certainly expressing intentional meaning.

Numerous studies have confirmed how easy it is to tell the difference between high quality abstract art and a child’s scribblings or an amateur’s attempt to mimic it. Researchers will pair various pieces of professional art by trained experienced artists with the work of a child. When they share these art pairings with audiences with varying degrees of artistic knowledge and experience, there is little doubt about which is which. Time and again viewers can instinctively identify the high quality intentional pieces, and more than 80% of viewers can easily discern the professional art from others’ work.

I’m often bemused by people who criticize and dismiss a beautiful abstract color palette but then marvel at the abstract beauty of a sunset. Living in Colorado, a land of expansive overwhelming landscapes that truly inspire, I think of and appreciate abstract art the same way I marvel at the grandeur of a breathtaking sky. Those stunning displays of color, with swirls and blends are the spirit of abstraction. In fact, appreciating landscapes is a helpful avenue into understanding abstraction. When people gaze at a picturesque mountain valley or a breathtaking sunset or a grove of golden aspens, they are quite literally appreciating the beauty of abstract art and color theory.

Abstraction has a close connection in both art and literature with the concept of distortion. Writer Flannery O'Connor once said, “I am interested in making a good case for distortion, as I am coming to believe that it is the only way to make people see.” Distorting something to make people truly “see” it seems to be counter-intuitive, though one could argue that all literature distorts information in order to make the point clear. From exaggeration to understatement to stock characters, metaphors, and cliched endings, abstraction and distortion can make the truth plain to see.

Often that truth, that revelation, can only come from – in Flannery O'Connor's word – distortion. How often have we encountered characters who only truly exemplify a trait or an idea because the trait is so glaringly obvious? How often have we told “some stretchers,” as Huck claims Mr. Mark Twain did, in order to impact an audience and help them “see” what we mean? Distortion and abstraction are natural parts of our language and our thinking.

This concept of distortion is particularly interesting because the word has a negative connotation. Certainly, to exaggerate a detail is in some ways deceptive. It might even be dishonest. But if we shift away from the concept of “distorting” and instead focus on simply emphasizing, then the act seems almost necessary.

Artist John Kascht, whose caricatures of many iconic figures have become iconic themselves, explains that he is not distorting the figures he draws but instead magnifying their traits. Kascht’s works have been featured in the Smithsonian, and his video explanation of his craft as he draws Conan O'Brien is fascinating in its analysis of the concept of artistic distortion – or magnification, emphasis, exaggeration, even abstraction.

This concept of emphasizing an idea or subject beyond its obvious reality is integral to our understanding of art, especially movements like impressionism, cubism, and abstract expressionism. And whether it's the writing of Flannery O'Connor or the caricature art of John Kascht, whether it’s the literary genre of Romanticism or the philosophical concepts of postmodernism, the techniques of abstraction and distortion are integral to the beauty of art.