(no subject)

I sang this my last year in the Women's Chorale at Coe College. (This is not us, obviously.) I post this because this message has struck me recently, and also I was thinking about our director. Hoff was not a lot of people's favorite professor, and sometimes he wasn't mine, but he loved music, and he loved theatre. The last year I was in school, when he took his yearly trip to New York, he brought back a Playbill for the revival of Sunday in the Park With George that he gave me, and he brought his Spring Awakening program so that I could look through it. He loved the choir; he loved doing the Christmas services every year, and once he had a bunch of us over to watch The Phantom of the Opera on DVD and there was a ton of food.

I didn't know -- probably could have guessed, but didn't know -- that he also suffered from depression. I think he was a lot like me in some ways, which is maybe why it hit me hard when he committed suicide in 2009. So like I said even if sometimes he wasn't my favorite professor, the chorale and being able to go sing was sometimes the only reason I was able to make myself get out of bed and face my day. Whether he knows that he gave that to me or not I'm not sure, but he did, and I wish I could have given him something similar.