Man and the Loss of Tradition: Weighing in the Balance by Karen

It's Friday night. A few dozen high-school warblers raise a toast over a bar. As they fill their bodies with a champagne-colored liquid, their drama club teacher laughs and tosses a brownie into his mouth. They, and their Styrofoam cups of ginger ale party hard without even breaking curfew. The next day, they give a couple of smashing performances. “Where's tonight's party?” students are likely to ask in the dressing room following the show. They need a place to joke about rehearsal bloopers, impersonate irksome teachers, and relax after a stress-filled stage moment.

Like all traditions, that of supervised “cast party” is heart-warming, but bound to change over time. Some hold that the main purpose of a cast party is to keep the kids from creating their own drunken revelries. Students tend to understand. Even students who don't particularly care about the law. They don't want to show up for the Saturday matinee with a hangover anymore than their directors and parents want them to. If parents offer to furnish a welcoming location, and free food, the kids will gladly show up.

Meanwhile, a parent-hosted cast party certainly poses an expensive, time-consuming answer to such a problem even when the supervised control it furnishes is usually considered to be the most valuable end of the deal. Things start to change in a community when parents trust their children (and other people's children) such that the potential risk that the students may engage in inappropriate behavior that could hinder their next-day performance is a lesser cost than the potential time/money/other effort that may be spent on a cast party. Let us imagine this as a scale:

Cost of Party (time/money)--------- Fear of unsupervised revelry

The greater the fear, the more time and money the parents will be willing to spend to ensure that their students are not, in fact, hosting their own unwise parties. If parents are relatively unafraid of such a phenomenon, the desire to host a party every night for the students will wane. It's about economic demand. Just as the horse-and-buggy lost its place in the economic market as the trust in the automobile increased, so may a community lose the charming “cast party” tradition. However, while it is human to mourn the loss of a beloved tradition, it must be remembered that “New and Improved” is one of America's core values.

Besides, losing a cast party isn't so bad when tradition-lovers consider that new-found, measurable trust in the youth of their community is a prize to be claimed. That extra box of brownie mix that you didn't waste on other people's kids might come in handy, too.