The young women and men were all dressed up beneath their caps and gowns-my friend’s son, the handsome Eli, wore a fetching pale orange button-down shirt, a green tie, and a conservative but well-cut poplin suit. But then I made it to the graduation at the Burr Burton Academy atop a gorgeous green hill. No one is functioning in disaster, much less finishing with a modicum of style. A particular wing of the Republican Party seemed not to have taken even an elementary school civics class, much less modern history of any kind, and the administration was, well, being the administration. Brown on the events leading up to World War I. War was escalating in so many places at once I was reminded of my Madeira Modern European History class and the lectures of the good Dr. My friend and favorite senator from Mississippi, a total class act and by far the best advocate for our poor state, was under siege from a primary challenger whom I’ll refrain from characterizing here in a Herculean effort to be a class act myself. On a particularly bad day this summer, for example, I was driving from the Hartford, Connecticut, airport to the Vermont graduation of my good friend Ellen’s son, late and speeding (in defiance of the charge of the ring on my little finger), and listening to an especially incessant drumbeat of doom on NPR. Perhaps because so few in our midst seem to be living by it. I have been thinking about Miss Madeira and her guiding principle a lot lately. When my mother was at Madeira in the 1950s, Miss Madeira was still alive and pretty much kicking and she delivered the line to the assembled girls almost every morning. I prefer the informal one, the one that was drummed into the student body by Lucy Madeira Wing, who founded the school in 1906, ten years after she graduated from Vassar. Festina lente (“Make haste slowly”) is the official motto, the one engraved on our class rings, but as anyone who knows me can tell you, that’s not really my thing.

“Function in disaster, finish in style” is one of the mottoes of the Madeira School, the all-girls boarding school in McLean, Virginia, where I happily spent my junior and senior years.

Grace under pressure meaning