I’m writing from Savannah, Georgia.

I’m here to give a lecture to the students at the Savannah College of Art and Design, or SCAD for short.

It’s an ugly little acronym, but the school is absolutely beautiful. The campus sprawls all over the city. “The city is the campus.” That’s what they said in the welcome video we watched upon our arrival. Except “video” isn’t the right word. It was a fully immersive digital experience called SCADstory.

Forsyth Park, Savannah, Georgia

It started in a room on the other side of the gift shop in the original building where they’d first held classes. When the doors closed behind us, an actual video began to play on what appeared to be a screen above an ornate bookshelf.

There were bookshelves on every wall. One whole column was made of books. There were giant marble busts, and a tiny cartoon version of Paula Wallace, SCAD’S president and founder, telling us about how she’d left her job as an elementary school teacher in 1977 and set off to create a school unlike anything the world had ever seen, an art school that focused on getting its students real-life jobs.

At this point, I let out an audible gasp for multiple reasons: One, my dad was an elementary school art teacher. Two, I’d also made it a point to usher undergrads and Arkansas high school students toward making a living with their art. And three, (this was the biggie) the wall where the video was playing — yes, the entire wall — cracked open to reveal a secret passageway into the next room, the final act of the world’s best college recruitment video.

Buy Eli Cranor's books - #Commissions Earned

There were laser lights and animatronic clocks and shots of students in their graduation caps talking about their bright futures, all these awesome jobs they’d landed.

And that's when I started to cry.

I’ll admit, this has been happening a lot more lately. My children love to tease me about it. They love to peek over at the end of whatever movie we’re watching and poke fun at the tears streaming down my cheeks. I don’t know why I keep doing this. Maybe I’m just a big softie these days. But I do know why I was crying at the end of SCADstory.

I was crying because of my kids.

I was crying because of the simple fact that a place like SCAD existed and they could possibly come there one day. They could fly east and spend the evening years of their youth in a city as beautiful as Savannah, a place cloaked in Spanish moss where every street corner, every live oak looks like something from a movie, a film some SCAD student might write, direct, produce, design.

I will meet these students tomorrow. I will stand before them and tell them my story, how a high school football coach took a leap of faith and gambled his whole life on his art. And when I do, I will be thinking of my daughter, my son, hoping one day, maybe, if the Southern stars align, they will find their way to Savannah too.

VISIT www.elicranor.com
JOIN my monthly newsletter
GET THE BOOKS!