YAC November and December memories

A YAC SENIOR CHAIR REFLECTION“Any eighth grade girls interested in learning a Japanese dance go to Madame Taylor’s room after lunch.”
I was the first one in Madame Taylor’s classroom after lunch.
As far as I was concerned my obsession with Japan was just another phase, admittedly inspired by the cartoons the country produced and the cheesy Japanese songs I heard when I played Dance Dance Revolution. Surely it would end in a month or two and I would move on to something else like cooking or computer programming or some other foreign language or culture. I had already been through French, Chinese, Italian, and Hebrew phases.
Today, I still plan on studying Japanese after high school.

That was the first time I met Carmen Clay and Mari Leslie.
The second time I met Carmen was the following summer in a fabric store. My mother had to pick up my brother Michael and didn't want to leave me alone in the house. But I was engaged in such a good book and didn’t want to get off the couch—clearly getting me to come with her was going to be a difficult task. But she managed to do it, and I can hardly imagine where I’d be now if she hadn’t.
Within a few days I found myself in my favorite Chinese restaurant with Carmen and two somewhat familiar faces. At this summer lunch meeting of the Youth and Adult Action and Advisory Council, or YAC as I soon learned it was called, were Luke Cornelson, a Junior that year who had befriended my brother through the cross country team, and Justin Ou, a Senior I only recognized because the incredible resemblance to his slightly annoying brother, who was a year younger than me, and because of his incredible dedication to getting my brother to host a cross country team breakfast during the pre-season. The conversation began with discussions about how to improve YAC for the coming year and how to engage the freshman class to get involved in service.
“Sarah, you’re a freshman, what do you think?”
What was he even talking about? What did I think about what?
“Do you think you can organize your grade into groups that will be willing to come up with a cool project and not fight amongst themselves?”
Why were they asking me to do this? I still had no idea what they were talking about.
But I went along with it.

Around that time I received a letter from the school’s orchestra director. The orchestra was going to China that year to perform in three cities during spring break.

By the time school started that year I had recruited one of my best friends Robert Clements, a much more vocal and to-the-point person than I was, into YAC. Together we organized what we thought were good clusters of freshmen into groups facilitated by older students in an attempt to engage as many of them as we could in service. The result: four groups of freshmen all going to the Boys and Girls Club to play with kids, many for the sole purpose of having an “easy project” with little planning or effort on their part. I was and still am all for supporting the Boys and Girls Clubs of America, but where there is no passion there is no purpose to even the most seemingly selfless actions.

Fall came and passed, and it was time to begin planning the annual Martin Luther King Day of service. This time every year is when opportunities for service, learning, and service learning become more abundant than usual. It was during this time that I happened to be in Mrs. Clay’s office for some random reason when I was asked to look at an e-mail.
“I think you would be very interested in this…”
She was right, the description of the competition had caught my attention, given my love of many cultures and my still-present obsession with Japan. The instructions were something along the lines of “create an art piece that promotes cultural diversity in your area.” The organization in charge of all of this was the Respect Diversity Foundation. Through this foundation I met Joan Korenblit. Joan was and still is one heck of an inspiration.
Shortly after I decided to enter the competition Joan took me to see past art pieces created for the same purpose. “Your goal is to create something like these,” she told me, pointing at the different works of art created by students and adults alike. Eventually she made it to her favorite piece. I don’t remember much about the piece except that it had mandalas, round pieces of wood painted to portray certain messages in certain foreign cultures, hanging off the bottom of it.
“Doves are a symbol of peace,” I muttered to myself. I began envisioning a stained-glass dove carrying an olive branch flying through glass shards of color. But only the eyes can interact with mere images, and since ending discrimination was a major goal of this project, why discriminate against the other senses? Shouldn’t we be able to touch the feathers, to hear the soft and proud wings of peace? And those mendalas are absolutely breathtaking…
Not that I actually thought anything I ever created would mean anything, would ever inspire anyone to stop and think about their lives any differently.
I had a vision of what my peace dove would look like, and I had an artist friend who showed me how I could actually put it together. He cut a block of Styrofoam into the shape of a bird and, with enormous amounts of help from some friends, began layering the base with paper mache and gluing on the feathers. It looked like a real dove, but I still wanted those mandalas on there somewhere!
While at Hobby Lobby the day after the final feather was added I noticed some unpainted mandalas and ribbon of a thousand colors.
There was no way I was going to be able to incorporate sound into this dove anyway. But if people couldn’t hear the wings soaring, why not let them hear people’s thoughts about peace? They wouldn’t actually hear anything except their own chatter of course. But that would be fine. The written word echoes even through death.
I brought the ribbons, mandalas, colorful paint and Sharpies the next time my freshman cluster went to the Boys and Girls Club.

The process was messy but my objective was met: the kids at the Boys and Girls Club said they wanted to do something artistic, so I let them paint the wooden star-shaped mandalas however they wanted, with whatever colors they chose. Many of them wanted to use every color they could get their hands on, because they insisted that their star would never be beautiful if each color wasn’t represented. How wise children can be. Some of the kids didn’t want to paint but they wanted to practice writing words and sentences. I told them to write on the ribbons what they thought about peace. The ribbons were glued to the mandalas and attached to the wings and belly of the dove. A rainbow was forming under the dove. I repeated the process with young kids from my own school, my peers in high school, my friends from other schools, and some people in the general public. Eventually the dove was soaring over a true rainbow of color and ideas.
The Beauty of Diversity, as I later called it, was never entered in that contest, but it was displayed at the Respect Diversity Foundation’s exhibit in the Science Museum Oklahoma, formerly called the Omniplex. I still call it the Omniplex because the name seems more engaging. I’m told that large crowds surrounded Beauty the duration of the opening night, but I was too busy admiring the works of other students to notice.

Spring break finally arrived. The orchestra went to China, but stopped briefly in Tokyo on the way there to change planes. In the thirty minutes I sat in that airport painfully hauling my giant viola case, my obsession with Japan became full-fledged love.

Over the following weeks I received e-mail notices from Joan that Beauty would become a part of the Foundation’s traveling exhibit, with my permission of course. I granted permission, wondering why that piece would be chosen for any exhibit beyond the initial display of all of the art pieces submitted that year. I’m told