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Well, my extraordinary friend, Patti, has done it again. She has taken a group of middle school kids with their own stresses and angst and hormones and quirks and turned them into a phenomenal musical cast. She’s been doing this for about seven years, in a suburban school just outside of Atlanta, and each year is more amazing than the last.

Patti is the volunteer director of Dickerson Middle School’s musical play. Yes, volunteer director. She spends about 2,000 hours a year choosing then tinkering with a full-length score so that she can include as many kids as possible in the show. Because that is Patti’s overriding mission: inclusion. And among middle school children, you know that can be a rare thing.

But while Patti is handing out parts and determining harmonies and adding dancing trees and multiple choruses… while she’s teaching kids about diction, projection, stage presence, expression, timing … while she’s working on the orchestration, choreography, costuming and staging … she’s also inspiring children to be the best they can be, and to support their cast mates in also being the best they can be. She’s building life-long friendships and memories that these children and their families will be talking about long after the last curtain call.

And most of all, Patti is taking a band of kids from all different walks of life and infusing them with the kind of self-esteem that will serve them well wherever they go from here; she’s taking jocks and preps and Goths and geeks and cheerleaders and ballerinas, independents and joiners, leaders and followers, “popular” kids and shy kids, and she’s building a team. She’s teaching them inclusion.

Now, don’t get me wrong; it’s not always peace-love-and-flowers in Patti’s world. After all, it is middle school. Can you spell h-o-r-m-o-n-e-s? I mean, she has to deal with egos, temperaments, schedules, frustrations – and that’s just from the parents.

But the transformation of the middle school kids that Patti directs is nothing short of a musical miracle. And this year’s show, Honk!, made it all the more pertinent. Honk! (which never made it to Broadway but won the equivalent of a Tony award in England) is basically the story of The Ugly Duckling set to toe-tapping music and an alternating sweet-and-sarcastic script. (Unbeknownst to the duck parents, a swan is hatched among their nest, and instead of a cute little quack, it makes a loud and musically-flat Honk!)

While the play takes us through the adventures of “Ugly” trying to find his way home – and finding himself in the process – it’s hard not to make comparisons between the play and the real lives of kids in middle schools all across the country. What better time than adolescence to teach our kids that it’s okay to be different, and it’s even more okay to respect and embrace the differences of others? After all, who doesn’t feel “different” in middle and high school? Who doesn’t think everyone’s staring at your bad hair day or the pimple on your chin? Who doesn’t feel like an “outsider” from time to time?

This year, Patti’s play selection and the process of bringing the play to life were both steeped in the same message: be willing to make friends with people who you might have thought were “different,” “weird” or worse. Because deep down, at one time or another, every one of us has felt (and will likely feel again) that we were the honkers in a world full of quacks.

by Ginger