Much of the scene last week was similar enough to verge on déjà vu. 

“Pomp and Circumstance” played while a long procession of young people made its way to assigned seating. Girls wobbled and clomped in high heels, boys swaggered and strutted. Parents whispered, shouted and sighed while waving congratulation signs. Student faces on sticks bounced around like those you see at a political convention. 

Up front was the customary gathering of too many officials, dignitaries and noteworthy types. I am pretty sure they are called “noteworthy” because they all have notes and think they have something worth saying. 

For the most part, they do not.  

You can’t blame AI for this because people have been wasting breath in much the same way since speakers wrote their notes with quillpens. The speeches kids ignored last Thursday were the same verbal sunshine I didn’t pay any attention to in 1968. 

 “As you go forth down the path of life to meet the challenges in this new beginning, harvesting the crop of success sown in these classrooms and watered with the sweat and tears, taking up the banner…” 

And so forth. After the microphone has been handed off a few times, it is like having bees live in your head. But, as worn out and overused as the speeches are, what else would the speakers say? “You have a bright future BEHIND you?” Or maybe “Good luck. If there were any real jobs out there, I’d have one myself instead of being a school administrator?” 

I wondered what I might say if I had the mike. Anything I could add to the standard speeches? Nothing came to me. 

There were a couple of big differences between this and my long-ago ceremony. 

The lesser but still significant jolt was the appearance of the kids. The girls were almost uniformly in eye-catchingly short dresses – the “mini” apparently standing for “minimal” – with a few opting for the longer, more formal and form-fitting “prom look.” There was a lot of “big hair,” obviously salon styled, and not all of it was on the girls… blue and purple highlights here and there along with sprinklings of glitter and a few styles I could only characterize as unfortunately creative. Boys were all over the place with their clothing, ranging from plain white James Dean T-shirts to seersucker sport coats and blue suede shoes. Two had on identical white tuxedoes with dark velvet trim, sparkly bowties, Ray Charles sunglasses, and rhinestone-encrusted footwear. 

High school students could not have gotten away with that in my day, which leads to the second shocker. This was not a high school graduation. These were EIGHTH GRADERS! 

All the bouquets of flowers large enough to drape over the neck of a Kentucky Derby winner, tuxedoes, gowns, signs that say “YOU MADE IT,” and speeches about picking up the banner and carrying it forth to bright horizons were for a middle-school promotion, kids who have yet to face acne. 

It seemed a little much, but it did give me an idea of how to update and upgrade the traditional speech for such an occasion. The noteworthy could say, “there is one challenge that is unique to these times, one that will be faced by parents and students alike.” And then he or she could pause dramatically, look around the room at the gathering of fidgety students and parents perched uncomfortably on bleachers without back rests, take in all the decorations, the expense and the excesses of an official ceremony, and continue: 

“In just a few years, you are going to have to do this all over again.”