Each of them came away with a highlight. For some, it was the pool, the experience of being in a hotel for the first time in their lives.
Others thought that seeing the president's helicopter being serviced (from a significant distance) was the coolest.
But what Jovon, a rising junior at Frederick Douglass High School, and another budding actor, Tavon Powell, 16 and a rising senior at Baltimore Talent Development High School, might remember most was their moment on stage at the Yale Repertory Theater.
A graduate student, Kevin Allen Daniels, 24, sat down and talked with the group. He said he never imagined being an actor, fearing instead that he would end up a drug dealer in his native Dallas.
Now he studies at the place that produced stars like Angela Bassett.
Miles asked Daniels to perform for them.
Daniels took his keys and his cell phone out of his shorts pocket and slipped into Shakespeake's Iago from Othello. The kids applauded enthusiastically. Then Miles asked if Daniels would give a mini-lesson to Jovon and Tavon, the group's most serious performers.
Tavon wore a bright yellow cast from a recent car accident, but he hopped up on stage without hesitation. He stood before an audience of his peers and launched into his own spoken-word piece, a personification of poetry as a sensual woman.
Impressed with the young man's flow, Daniels clutched his heart as he paced the aisle listening to him.
Jovon - the class clown who was at times so hyper that he broke into a dance in the hotel hallway or injected himself into a game of Frisbee on Yale's quad - channeled all of that energy into a Nat Turner monologue he had memorized.
Coaching him, Daniels said, pointing to the audience, "Look at them. You are trying to start an uprising. Convince those people."
julie.bykowicz@baltsun.com
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