During Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat when I came out to ask the audience for donations, I always talked about how the Empress Theatre is all about dreams. Leo Ware's dream of restoring the Empress Theatre and producing plays, our dreams of expanding from the Empress Theatre to the Oquirrh Hills Performing Arts Complex, the dreams of our actors and other volunteers.
Randy Pausch was also about dreams. If you haven't seen this video yet, you need to. Yes, it's an hour and 16 minutes long, but you need to watch it anyway.
One of my early mentors once told me to live my life as if each day might be my last, but also to live as though each day was the first day of the rest of my life. That was always good advice, but Randy Pausch tells it with a little more punch than most. Today really was his last day, and he knew it was coming when he gave "the last lecture."
The same mentor taught me "Someone has everything you want in life, and they will gladly give it to you if you but give them what they want." Randy Pausch was about fulfilling not only his dreams, but of fulfilling the dreams of those around him.
And he wasn't satisfied to do just one dream at a time! He went after quantity as well as quality.
As a boy, he wanted to "be" Captain Kirk. This man, in real life, exuded all of the leadership, courage, and stength of Captain Kirk. I only hope that when my turn comes, that I may go as boldly as he!
Most of us have seen or read stories of adoptions of Haitian children following the earthquake last month. Some of the stories have had a positive slant (the charity has saved children...) other's have had a negative slant (the "missionaries" who kidnapped and tried to smuggle 33 children across the border into the Dominican Republic). At a family gathering yesterday, my wife heard a story about a couple that was "finally" able to adopt a child they've been trying to adopt for about 4 years. As the story was related to me, this couple had originally been matched with this child about 4 years ago, but the adoption was cancelled when the parents of the child took her back and parented her themselves. After about three years of caring for the child, the natural parents returned her to the orphanage because both of them had been diagnosed with tuberculosis; a death sentence in Haiti. (Mortality for untreated TB is about 67%.) The adoption was finalized just befo...
Comments
www.thoughtsofliz.blogspot.com