Senior Speaker Series: Gigi Wood '20
On Monday, December 9, at Community Meeting four-year senior Gigi Wood ’20 took the stage for the third installation of the Senior Speaker Series.
The Series is an opportunity for our student leaders and the wisest most experienced members of the Vermont Academy student body to have the floor and share their thoughts, philosophies, stories, and perspectives with their peers and underclassmen.
Gigi read her college essay about her relationship with her grandmother and how she taught her to step out of her comfort zone and be a performer. Below is her essay and selected poem:
Choices:
By Tess Gallagher
By Tess Gallagher
I go to the mountainside
Of the house to cut saplings,
And clear a view to snow
On the mountain. But when I look up,
Saw in hand, I see a nest clutched in
The uppermost branches.
I don’t cut that one.
I don’t cut the others either.
Suddenly, in every tree,
An unseen nest
Where a mountain
Would be.
In fourth grade, I was quite the performer. Every night right before dinner Mim, my grandmother would call. I thought I could have some fun with that. I picked up the phone in a British accent, “Ello Governor! Wood Residence, How may I help you?” At first, Mim was surprised, but she went along with it. She would ask me all types of questions and I created elaborate backstories for each of my imagined secretaries, often switching back and forth from different accents and characters for hours. I told thrilling stories just to hear the muffled laughter of my grandmother. I wanted to make her smile. As I got older the calls began to fade; it was no longer cool in my teenage mind to call Mim for hours. I got busy and would often cut our calls short with a lame excuse so I could go text my friends. But I know Mim was patiently waiting by the phone, hoping that I would call with my secretary voice. Our playful relationship turned more into gossip time and our hour-long calls turned into thirty-minute calls. When I was a freshman in high school, Mim passed away.
Her death hit me hard because she had been my best friend and someone I wasn’t afraid to be myself around. During my sophomore year, my English class participated in an annual competition called Poetry Out Loud. Struggling to recite and memorize my poetry selection, I got the idea to create a persona for the speaker of my poem, just like I had done years ago with Mim. I posed a question to my English teacher, “Can I use my poetry voice?” She giggled and said, “ Do you have a poetry voice?” I responded, “Yes.” What she didn’t know is that my poetry voice was the voice of one of the many secretary characters I had developed when calling Mim. Using this voice, I made it all the way to the finals in the competition. As I stepped on the auditorium stage for the Poetry Out Loud Finals, my face was red with anxiety, my palms were sweaty, and my head was spinning. But there was a little voice in my head that said, “just pretend you’re talking to Mim.” As I recited my two selected poems, I felt confidence surging through me. I could feel my grandmother smiling down on me from heaven, knowing that she had ignited this performer side in me during our special phone calls. Mim egged me on; she had always looked forward to these calls and relished my performances.
Although I did not win the competition I witnessed something shift within myself. I was not afraid to be my dorky, goofy, emotional self. I was unapologetically me. This competition changed my school life completely because I started embracing my skills instead of hiding them. Losing my fear of challenging myself opened the door to many experiences that have changed my life. I soon found myself conversing about politics and ideologies in car rides with my teachers and friends. I could hold longer conversations about ideas and policies that intrigued me. I found myself saying things that I would have never said as a freshman. I was no longer just the hockey player, I was a performer, a scholar, an athlete, and most importantly, myself.
Vermont Academy is a coed college preparatory boarding and day school in southern Vermont, serving grades 9-12 plus a postgraduate year.
