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ASTHAMPTON — Inside the gymnasium at Easthampton High School, it was hot Friday night. As fans whirred overhead, adults in folding chairs fiddled with phones, cameras and iPads.
Balloons floated in the heat. There were four behind the stage that had been set up at one end of the gym — in the shapes of “2,” “0,” “1” and “6.” Some audience members had their own: one read, “Congratulations,” another, simply, “Done.”
Down the hall from the gym, 103 maroon-robed students milled about in and around the air-conditioned auditorium.
Among them was Andrew Connelly, who was the valedictorian of the Easthampton High class of 2016. He was nervous about his speech.
“How do I write something that applies to a hundred people?” he asked. “Everybody’s going to college or to work. They’ll go so many different paths.”
His mortarboard was decorated with a map of Manhattan and the phrase “Broadway here I come.” In the fall, he will start as a theater major at Fordham University in the Bronx.
Connelly, 18, said he found his path to the future while in high school.
“I was never really a shy kid, but I found my place when I found theater,” he said.
His classmates echoed the sentiment. Class president Hunter Lefebvre could barely play guitar when he joined the school’s jazz band, he said, and now he will study music education at the University of Southern Maine.
Salutatorian Alexis White said she decided to study biology at Simmons College after seeing mother sea turtles on a school-related trip during spring break to Costa Rica.
Abigael Fromm said she was particularly excited to graduate after having been held back a year in 11th grade.
“When you realize you’re actually graduating for the first time, you get nervous,” she said. “But as long as you have people in the audience to support you, you can make it through anything.”
A few minutes later, they were filing into the gym. Many of the speakers — who included several students in addition to Principal Kevin Burke and state Sen. Donald F. Humason Jr., R-Westfield – touched on themes including perseverance, bravery and, especially, connection. Many of the students had gone to school together for 13 years.
When Connelly took the podium, he expounded on those connections. He quoted the musical “Hamilton” and talked about the concept of legacy — how his class would be remembered.
He shared his own memories of dozens of individual students, and he gave them a Twitter hashtag — #EHSLegacy16 — with which to do the same. He told them their legacy would be in each other’s memories.
“Your legacy doesn’t have to be something big or challenging or expensive,” he said. “Sometimes your legacy is the things you do every day to make someone’s life better.”
Jack Evans can be reached at jackevan@umail.iu.edu.