Tales from the jar side: What happened to Rowena, Being wrong but not staying wrong, and Other tweets
I'm reading a book on anti-gravity. I CAN'T PUT IT DOWN. (rimshot)
Welcome, fellow jarheads, to Tales from the jar side, the Kousen IT newsletter, for the week of August 28 - September 4, 2022. This week I taught a class on Functional Programming in Java on the O’Reilly Learning Platform and two days of a private Android course.
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The Rowena Question, Resolved
I don’t mentioned it very often, but I actually have a blog. It’s hosted at Wordpress (the .com site — nothing I’m managing myself) and is registered as kousenit.org. It’s not terribly active. I blame Twitter for that. Blog posts back then have become threaded tweets now. Occasionally, when I get into a technical topic in the newsletter, I extract the code and turn it into a blog post, but even that I haven’t done as often as I would have liked. The fact that very few of my posts have any comments on them at all shows the low level of activity.
(By the way, last year, when I wrote my Help Your Boss Help You book, I published a whole series of blog posts about it. Those posts, however, all appeared in my Medium blog, because they were ultimately published in the Pragmatic Programmers publication there. I have mixed feelings about that, partly because to read them you really kind of need to pay for Medium, and partly because I’m currently paying way too much for Wordpress. But I digress.)
One post, however, is the exception. Here are the lifetime viewer stats for that post:
(Note: I may be completely misreading that figure, which might be for the blog overall. Still, the post in question is the only one with double-digit number of comments on it.)
I published that post way back in March, 2007. The title is Silly Mr. Holland’s Opus Question, and it asks about the character of Rowena Morgan in the movie Mr. Holland’s Opus.
Warning: lots of spoilers for a 16-year-old movie ahead.
Mr. Holland (played brilliantly by Richard Dreyfus, for which he earned an Academy Award nomination) is a high school music teacher tempted by a beautiful student, Rowena (played by Jean Louisa Kelly). She is planning to run away to New York and become a singer, and wants him to come with her.
He doesn’t, fortunately. Mr. Holland is a deeply flawed individual, but the best feature of the movie is that he learns and gets better. He’s tempted, but he ultimately does the right thing.
The temptation reaches its peak when Rowena performs Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me during the school’s Gershwin revue:
She does a fantastic job, but equally impressive is the performance of Glenne Headly as Mr. Holland’s wife, who suddenly realizes what is going on. I think you can also see the moment when Mr. Holland decides not to go with her as well, but I may be reading too much into that.
At the end of the movie, after a 30+ year teaching career, his position is eliminated when they drop the entire music department at the school. He proceeds to be wrong once again, by thinking that his whole life has been wasted. Everyone surprises him with a retirement ceremony / concert, featuring former students from his entire career. The one who gives the big speech at the end is Gertrude Lang, who in school desperately wanted to play the clarinet but couldn’t get out of her own way until he sat with her and told her to “play the sunset.”
Gertrude returns as Governor Lang (presumably of Oregon), whose life was changed by Mr. Holland. She gives a very moving tribute to him, before they debut the symphony he had been working on for 30 years.
Conspicuous by her absence, however, is Rowena. She isn’t shown, and nobody comments on her. The movie ends and you have no idea what happened to her. Was she too embarrassed to show up? Did she fail in New York and is now destitute? Did she become a big star and didn’t appear because she had a performance that evening? Nobody knows.
I get roughly two to three comments a year on that post (it’s up to 57 total comments now), and everybody wonders the same thing but nobody knows anything definitive. At least that was true until this week, when a commenter named Norton Chia found the answer. The comment said that Kelly gave a recent interview on the RetroZest podcast, and at the 32:24 minute mark she addresses that question:
Interviewer: Your character arc reaches a crescendo and suddenly you’re gone.
Jean Louisa Kelly: We did shoot that scene and I did come back at the end, and they had me dressed [as a Broadway star]. But then they tested it, and it didn’t test well. People didn’t like the idea that he nearly strayed … [so they cut the scene]. But it was fun to shoot it.
She points out that she did all the singing and dancing herself, but that’s the only part of the podcast which focuses on that movie. So if you believe the actor (and I have no reason not to), we finally have an answer. They intended for her to return, and she was successful. Now we know.
I have to say, though, that digging into that movie again after all these years has been emotionally rather intense. As I mentioned, he’s wrong all the time, about everything:
He tells his boss when he starts that he’s only planning to do this on the side, and spend more time in composition. That doesn’t go over well with the Principal (played by Olivia Dukakis).
He takes too long to adapt his teaching style to the needs of the students.
He is very reluctant to spend extra time with students who need it.
He is terrible a directing the marching band and needs to be bailed out by his friend, Coach Meister (played by Jay Thomas).
He gives up on an athlete trying to find a way to join the band in order to preserve his academic eligibility. (“I did my best!” Holland claims when he fails. “Then your best isn’t good enough!” his friend, the Coach, replies.)
When his son is born and turns out to be deaf, he is so heartbroken that he gives up on him.
He nearly abandons his job, wife, and family to run away with a teenager.
He ultimately believes that all the work he did over the years was a waste.
The thing is, though, is that he learns from every one of those events. He connects to the students on a deep level and adjusts what he does to whatever they need. He performs a concert at the school for the deaf that his son attends, and uses lights and colors to share what is going on. He does stay with his wife and family and values them as he should.
I’m oversimplifying, because none of those changes in his character are simple or painless. He’s a very stubborn man, and has to be practically hit over the head with how wrong he is at every stage. But, in the end, he gets it, and the journey is extraordinary.
One of the phrases I live by in my professional career is:
I’m wrong a lot, but I don’t stay wrong.
When I’m teaching and I discover that I was wrong about a particular topic, I fix it. I don’t have any events in my career as dramatic as those in the movie, but that’s probably a good thing. My goal is to stay adaptable, and I try to stay reasonably humble, acknowledging that today’s best practices are tomorrow’s maintenance problems.
So I connect to the movie on a very deep level. I can honestly say that it changed my life, not because I redirected my career right away when I first saw it in 2006, but because it forced me to acknowledge what I suspected at the time: I had gone in the wrong direction, and I should stop worrying about sunk costs and go ahead and fix it.
I hope that someday you find your own path in your career and your life. I didn’t find my dream job until I was nearly 40. I didn’t become a conference speaker until 45, and I didn’t publish my first book until age 51. It’s never too late.
I suggest, however, you don’t abandon your family and run away to New York with a kid, no matter how beautifully she sings. Not that I’m turning down any recent offers, mind you, but that still seems like a good general rule.
Related jokes
Being tempted by a kid reminds me of a couple of quick stories. One is that recently my music service offered up the Ringo Starr cover of You’re Sixteen and all I could think of is that the lyrics to the chorus should be rewritten as:
You’re sixteen
So statutory
And you’re mine!
The world was very different when that song was written. Imagine trying to publish that now. Or the Beatles song I Saw Her Standing There, which begins
She was just 17. You know what I mean.
Yes, we do, and stop it. Not mention, eww.
The other story I remember is about watching a comedian years ago who made a joke about sleeping with a 17-year-old. He followed up with.
Don’t worry, I don’t want to sleep with 17-year-olds. Wait, yes I do. Everybody does. That’s why there are laws.
Good point. By the way, if you feel a bit awkward watching that video of Ms. Kelly, know that (1) she’s now 50, (2) she is a bigger star than you could ever date, and (3) her husband is James Pitaro, President of ESPN. She’s fine.
Other Tweets
Keeping with the theme of men who only want to date children, this tweet is funny if you get the context:
Apparently Leonardo DiCaprio is famous for dropping all his girlfriends once they reach the age of 25. Here’s the related graphic:
![r/dataisbeautiful - Leonardo DiCaprio Refuses to Date a Woman His Age [OC]](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F774a0719-30d1-4541-8b13-d816e4183439_960x960.png "r/dataisbeautiful - Leonardo DiCaprio Refuses to Date a Woman His Age [OC]")
Sounds to me like there are some “issues” there.
Ethical Hacking
Obviously I do not endorse becoming a hacker, but if you must do it, consider this idea:
Again — stupid, dangerous, and very funny.
A Ship of Theseus Joke
That’s the second time the philosophical problem known as the Ship of Theseus has come up in this newsletter in the past couple of months. As a reminder, the Ship of Theseus problem says if every part of the original ship is replaced with new items, is it still the same ship? If not, at what point is it no longer the ship of Theseus?
I recently realized that sports teams are also an excellent example of the Ship of Theseus problem. If all the players change, is it still the same team? What if the administrators change? How about if the owner sells the team? What if the team moves to another city? What if it keeps the same name in the new city as the old, resulting in abominations like the Utah Jazz?
I’ll probably wrestle with that in a future newsletter.
Yet Another 90’s Movie Reference
I can’t believe this never occurred to me:
They could probably call it a prequel too and get away with it.
The Last Word from the 90s
Seems only fair to give Monica Lewinsky the last word on events from the 90’s. Life was so much simpler then, wasn’t it?
Have a great week, everybody. :)
As a reminder, you can see all my upcoming training courses on the O’Reilly Learning Platform here and all the upcoming NFJS Virtual Workshops here.
Last week:
Android development, two days, private class
Functional Programming in Java, on the O’Reilly Learning Platform
This week
No classes! Maybe I’ll actually get my act together and finish the next beta of Mockito Made Clear.
That line about finding your own path and your timeline was very encouraging! I'm fortunate, among many others I'm sure, that you made the career change. I really enjoyed reading Mockito Made Clear. I like that you have full *working* examples of everything, it makes a huge difference. I even used the discount at the end of the book to buy your "Help Your Boss Help You" book. I guess you could say I'm a fan now. Maybe you'll sign my pdf one day ha!