50+ Lifestyles

PUBLISHER’S CORNER – Lessons from Seussical

By Dan Adams

Lessons from Seussical

I have to admit, when I dropped my daughter off at the Center for Living Arts, I thought “what on earth can these 24 kids accomplish in only 10 days of the summer?” As I finished my short drive to our office, three blocks away in downtown Rock Island, I also couldn’t help but think about Dr. Seuss, the many books and stories over the years. It occurred to me that I didn’t know anything about Seussical and the Center for Living Arts. Upon settling into my office, I found the Centers website at www.center4living.com and this is where I found a little more about both. I loved they were a local ‘mom and pop’ (as they described it on their front page). After all, Lighthouse Homecare is a local ‘mom and pop’ business. I take this opportunity to point out that we have a fantastic Administrator, Cynthia Bostic and Office Manager, Jen Hughes and a superior nursing staff (Sally and Teresa) really running the show. The 50+ Lifestyles magazine is also a local ‘mom and pop’ business. David, Mike, Eloise and I are all part of this community and rely on your readership and patronage to our ‘local’ content and ‘local’ advertisers to continue to
produce this fine magazine.

The Center’s website continues with “Everyone has the ability to tell a story, and we all tell stories every day.” I was very pleased that our daughter had picked such an interesting place to hang out for a couple weeks this summer. It appeared that she was in good hands with Dino and Tina Hayz, who write, “We are here to help you find your ‘center’ and then live creatively from that space. Life is just too short to let it slip away without having had some fun and learned something new along the way!”

Ahhhh finally, deeper in the website I found what Suessical is all about as well. It centers around an Elephant (Horton), who is the only one that can hear a small little world where the ‘Whos’ live. This world lands on a spec of dust, and Horton finds himself caring for the spec until it is kidnapped by monkeys. Horton then finds himself faithfully guarding an abandoned egg and sold to the circus. The one person who never lost hope in him was Gertrude McFuzz, who continues to try to get Horton’s attention. Ultimately, she finds him at the circus, and well, the rest of the story plays out.

Fast forward two weeks…

Showtime is here, during these 10 days, these kids built the play sets, learned their lines and were ready for the big day. Little did I know, it would be such a great performance by all. The show made you laugh and nearly made you cry. It was full of everything the Hayzs’ said it would be, and they fulfilled their promise of, “Life is too short to let it slip away without having had some fun.”

As I left the play, I couldn’t help but come home and search for the quotes to live by as expressed in Suessical. Here are some of my favorite quotes, and I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I enjoyed reading them over and over, thinking back to the wonderful performance I had just experienced:

“And if worse comes to worse, as we all know it will, thank your lucky stars you’ve gotten this far.”