A Story of a Risky College Application Video

During COVID, my mom faded away in nursing home.  As a tribute to her, my middle daughter and I started playing a couple shaky songs in local nursing homes.  This grew to monthly shows in the dementia and the Alzheimer's units in our area.  She'd sing, play the flute, piano, or rock an egg-shaker. 

Flash forward to December last year -- college application month for competitive US schools.

Having obsessed over her top school's application for three months, she read a last-minute footnote that made her blood freeze. "You can submit an optional 2-minute video if you wish."  She had 36-hours to do this. Or she could say "Good enough," and just sleep in.

The best admission videos you see online are ridiculously impressive.  Giving a Nobel Prize speech, playing "Dueling Cellos" with Yo-Yo Ma, winning the Global Geometry Olympics and chest bumping the rest of your team in slow motion.

In the next 36 hours, she decided to create a music video.

We happened to be playing a Christmas show in a nursing home the next day.  She rewrote the words to the song "My Favorite Things" to emphasize why she was a great fit for her dream college. 

For a teenage girl, singing every month in Alzheimer units isn't cool, impressive, nor is it a transferable skill that you'll take to college.  Still, she reasoned, submitting any video would be better than her submitting no video. 

Yesterday she flew a red-eye back from that college, and  I drove up to the Syracuse airport to pick her up.  While we were there, we had Costco rotate our all-season tires for real snow tires, as we killed time watching The Housemaid at the theatre next door.

So much happens to kids the year after they send their college applications in.  The whole process must be a forgettable blur -- their career goals, their statement, and any last-minute video they might have sent -- basically forgotten. 

Driving through the snow flurries on the way home, I asked her what specific things she had planned for her 12 days of vacation.  She said, "Let's play all of those Christmas shows together."

That's a risky thing to say on a snowy road to a dad who can't even watch It's a Wonderful Life without crying a river.