RIP: Sharon Raymond

My Jr. High school choir director, and my high school choreographer, Sharon Raymond, passed away recently. Sharon and her husband Gene, who was the high school director, had founded the Mooresville Spotlighter show choir back in the mid '70s. It was one of the very first show choirs in the Midwest, and has gone on to become one of the premiere show choirs in the country over the past 40 years, and is still nationally known today.

I was a member of the Spotlighters for 3 years in high school, as both a guitarist and a performer. And I have had the privilege of serving as the emcee for the annual Spotlighter Invitational since its inception in 1993, an event they had dreamed of starting, and was ultimately launched a few years after they left Mooresville.

They had lived out of state for many years, but upon her passing, her family had decided to hold a memorial service for her back here in Indiana. They were kind enough to allow me to say a few words, as one of her former students. Here is what I offered at the service:

Like many of you, I met Sharon Raymond in 7th Grade. Initially, in my under-developed, adolescent mind, if you had asked me what I thought about her then, I would have told you that she wasn’t my favorite teacher in the world. She was loud, and brash, a little bit scary, and not in any way afraid to let you have it when you weren’t doing things as she would like them done.

But it didn’t take long, even at that young age, to begin to appreciate her love and passion for her job, and for her students. And for some reason, she saw a talent in me that I’m not sure I even knew I had at the time. By the next year, she had placed me in the select choir in 8th Grade at Paul Hadley — PH Factor. She gave me my first solo, a number during which I was supposed to sing and shimmy, like Elvis.

Prior to performing our first show for our parents, we performed that show for the rest of the students at school during lunch. I was ready — I shimmied up to the microphone stand, grabbed the mic like Elvis would do, and promptly smacked myself right in the teeth with it, causing the sound system to screech as though it had frapped out. I don’t know how many of you here today might remember that, but as I do not embarrass easily anymore, I can assure you I remember it well.

My freshman year, I met Gene for the first time. I was in the Freshman choir and found out soon enough that not only did Sharon teach at the Jr. High, but she choreographed all the choirs at the high school. Like most Freshman, after I saw the Spotlighters for the first time, I knew I wanted to be in that group.

My sophomore year, I joined the group as the guitar player. Some of you might not remember that, because I wasn’t very good at it. But I was the only Sophomore male to make the group that year. I felt pretty cool. Until, that is, I had to go to my first Spotlighter class and sit next to Tony West and Mike Bridgewater. THOSE guys were cool, and I was instantly humbled.

The next 3 years were some of the best years of my life. Being in Spotlighters, and spending my junior year in Gene’s music theory class provided me with some of the best memories of my teenage years. And as I’ve continued to earn at least a portion of my income over the years as a musician and entertainer, the lessons I learned from Gene and Sharon during that time have been invaluable to me as an adult.

Being in high school, we obviously spent more time with Gene than we did Sharon over those years, seeing her only on the few days she would come to class during the day to teach us our choreography, and again at our evening practices and our performances themselves.

Most of my memories from that time center around the interaction I had with my friends and fellow Spotlighters. I could probably share with you 20 or 30 stories about Sharon, and probably have forgotten 20 or 30 more. But here’s something I think we all remember:

She was a crier.

Not a wailer, or a bawler, mostly just tears and sniffles. But she would cry at the drop of a hat. She’d cry when we did a particularly good performance, and she’d cry when we stunk up the place. She’d cry when she had to yell at us for something, or she’d cry when we nailed our ballad. She’d cry when she talked about her kids. She’d cry telling us about a song she’d heard, or a movie she’d watched that moved her to tears. I can still remember the day after she’d seen the movie Dirty Dancing for the first time. She came to class raving about the dancing and choreography in the film. She told us all to go see it right away. And she cried the entire time she told us about it.

You could carry on an entire conversation with her, with tears streaming down her face, and her sniffling away.

Most often, we, as students, have to grow up, graduate and move on before we are able to see our teachers as the humans they are, before we realize the love and the passion they have for what they do, and to see how cool they really are.

I was fortunate to have a close relationship with several of my teachers, that was able to reach beyond the barriers of the normal parent-teacher relationship. Gene and Sharon weren’t just my choir teachers. They were my friends. But many of you in this room today had that same type of relationship with Gene and Sharon that I did. Because it is what they allowed us to do. They invited us into their lives and shared with us that passion they had for the perfect song, the perfect move, the perfect performance.

We CALLED them Gene and Sharon, for crying out loud. How many teachers did you address by their first name? I don’t remember many of us at all calling them Mr. and Mrs. Raymond. But then, maybe we should have after all.

All those tears Sharon used to cry… we all saw it pretty quickly. It was her passion. That’s really what we’re all here to celebrate today. A life FULL of passion. And she passed that on to all of us. Look around you. We’re not here because of some great dance move she came up with. We’re all here because she placed something into each of us that we’ve never been able to shake.

I’ve seen Gene and Sharon maybe 3 times since they moved away. Only the few times they’ve come back to serve as judges for the Spotlighter Invitational, an event I’m so thankful I get to be involved in every year. I bet some of you haven’t seen them for 30 years or more.

And yet, here you are. Why? Because she means something to you. She means something to all of us. She instilled something in us — her passion and her love for what she did — and that will be with us forever. We will never forget it, and we will never forget her.

I’m thankful they were my teachers. I learned and trained under the absolute best. But I’m even more proud to call her and Gene my friends. To all her family, I’m so sorry for your loss, and my wife and I offer you our deepest sympathies. Thank you all for allowing me a few minutes to honor such a wonderful person. Like you, I will miss her.