Schools
VIDEO: 'SNL' Alum Rachel Dratch Gives LHS Grads Improv Advice for Life
The improv comedienne, who graduated from Lexington High School in 1984, returned home to deliver the commencement speech to LHS Class of 2012 on Sunday, June 3 at the Tsongas Arena in Lowell.
At high school graduations, the commencement speaker is almost always someone from the Class of Fill-in-the-Blank with an impressive resume. Rarely does said resume include stints with Second City and “Saturday Night Live.”
So when Lexington native and “SNL” alum Rachel Dratch stepped to the podium at the graduation ceremony ’s Class of 2012, it was pretty clear the life lessons would come with a lot of laughs.
“I turned my love of disrupting class into a focused study of improv comedy,” said Dratch, who graduated LHS in 1984. “I joined the improv group in college, I went on to Second City in Chicago and finally onto ‘Saturday Night Live.’ This meteoric rise to success took 10 years, so know that the cliché of following your dreams can take a while, which presents another useful cliché: ‘Stick with it.’
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“Yes, definitely stick with it,” she continued, “Unless you suck, and then you should probably move on to something else.”
Dratch looked to those same experiences to offer more advice to the graduates.
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“When I sincerely stopped to think about what advice I would want to have when I was in high school, I realized the best advice I could give would be the same advice I would give to someone who was trying to learn improv comedy,” Dratch said, adding that with those three are the secret to being a good improv comedian and “good human being as well.”
Check back later for more coverage from the Lexington High School Class of 2012’s commencement ceremony, held Sunday, June 3 at the Tsongas Arena in Lowell.