Alumni Profile

I am Christopher St. Clair, BCD class of 2010 2S. I came to Berkshire Country Day Secondary School as a ninth-grader in the fall of 2006 and left in the summer of 2007 with the closing of the high school. I graduated from BCD with High Honors.When I first arrived at BCD, I was incredibly nervous: out of the entire school, I was the only new student. I had not made any close friends during my last three years in the New Lebanon Public School system, and now here I was surrounded by another school of strangers, most of whom had known each other for as long as they could remember. I quickly learned, however, that my experience at BCD would not be what I had expected.
My teachers and peers possessed a true dedication to learning. This made me love my classwork, but what occurred outside of the classroom is what really amazed me about BCD. It was a community. I remember clearly Mr. Clifford coaching us in the three R’s of soccer (and of life in general): Respect yourself, Respect your opponent, and Respect the game. That really sums it all up for me. Our teachers respected us, we respected each other, and we all respected our school. This respect was plain to see in our theater teacher Mr. Howard.
That year I took part in our production of “The Secret in the Wings,” the most exhausting production I have ever been in. The play was a surreal collage of fairytale vignettes where nearly every actor played at least three characters with up to a dozen costume changes. The lighting booth had the most intimidating set of cues I ever heard of. However, Mr. Howard led us through it. No matter our age or talent, he treated us as equals and gave us the guidance and the liberty to make the play our own. I am now a music teacher, and this above all else is how I aspire to teach.Another of my fondest memories from BCD is of our end-of-the-year trip to China. I was in tenth-grade Social Studies that year, so the tenth-graders and I packed our bags and flew for sixteen hours straight from JFK to Beijing. We walked on the Great Wall, explored the Forbidden City, haggled with peddlers for five-dollar Rolex knock-offs, and quickly learned that actual Chinese food is nothing at all like what we have back home. We each even got to live with a foster family for a week. That above all else illustrated to me the greatest lesson that I took from our trip: no matter how different another person’s culture or traditions might be, we are all really the same when it comes to heart and home.The experience itself, however, is not why this is one of my fondest memories of BCD. Instead, it is that I felt equally comfortable among the tenth-graders as among the students of my own year. While at BCD, I had friends in every grade. There was no segregation by age or sect whatsoever. The whole school was one big clique. Nowhere was this shown to me more than on the day when everyone was asked to come to the dining room for an all-school meeting. There we were told that BCD2S would be closing at the end of the year. Then, one by one, every student and every teacher spoke about what BCD meant to them. I have rarely seen such a wealth of emotion, grief, and actual love as I saw then. Nearly everyone was crying, and all at the loss of a school. It was only my second week, and I had only just begun to make friends among my classmates, but it did not take long after that for me to figure out why our school was loved so much: it was a family.

After leaving BCD many of my schoolmates and I enrolled in Bard College at Simon’s Rock and together we took the plunge into the life of early college. Four years later I graduated magna cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts in Jazz Performance and Audio Engineering. I also had the privilege of designing my ideal thesis: I created an album. I gathered four of my classmates into a band and together we wrote four original jazz and fusion instrumental songs. I organized the rehearsals, arranged the material, and recorded, mixed, and mastered the album. I also transcribed each composition and wrote a dissertation analyzing their structure and recounting the process of creating the recording. Finally, we performed our compositions in front of a live audience, including my thesis committee.

Now, I am living in my hometown of New Lebanon, NY with my fiancée Amy. We are to be married this July. I work as a Studio Engineer at Muddy Angel Music & Arts in Richmond, MA (the same studio where I recorded my thesis and interned for my major). I also give private music lessons, which is the most rewarding work I have ever done. Finding more students to teach is currently my greatest endeavor. Whatever the instrument, they all speak different dialects of the same language, and teaching the intricacies of that language is my greatest passion. If you have a love for the language of music, either as a complete beginner or as a furthering of your passion, write to me at [email protected]. Whether or not you are seeking a teacher, I would be delighted to give you whatever assistance I can.

If I were to give any advice to the students at BCD today, I would say this: pay attention. There are not many places like BCD in our world, and you will have left sooner than you think. Stop and look. See the camaraderie, respect, and love you have for your friends and your teachers. They are family, and all that really matters is our time with our family. (photo by Jane Feldman, www.janefeldman.com)

Years and grades at BCD: 1st (1973/74) and 5th thru 9th (1978-83)

What are your fondest memories from BCD?
My fondest memories are hanging out on the second floor in the main building in a small room just by the stairs where I learned to use an Apple II and its floppy disk drives. A few of us used the modem into the phone line to connect to certain mainframe bulletin boards before there was the Internet. I remember owning a few boxes of floppy disks that I held dear to me and protected with my life. This was made possible by the generosity of The Sprague Family, who donated the computer to the school.Where did you go once you left BCD?
Josephine Abady, who ran the Berkshire Theatre Festival at the time where I began working professionally as an actor, suggested I study theatre at The Interlochen Arts Academy (we nicknamed it “Fame in the woods”) at the top of Michigan. Funny that I spent years of my childhood around Interlaken, Massachusetts and then attended a high school in Interlochen, Michigan. I would suggest to anyone aspiring to be an artist of any kind to check it out. The mixture of academia and art is fantastic. I would send my kids there in a heartbeat, if we ever acquire any…After graduating from Interlochen, I was awarded a full scholarship at Carnegie Mellon University to double major in Drama and Musical Theatre in 1986. Now keeping in mind that I go against the grain, I realized that fraternities held nothing for me. My favorite thing about CMU was that they used this form of communication where you could get onto a computer and message a fellow student in a simplified forum of inter-collegiate social networking. You typed a short message to them and it would be instantly sent to a personal virtual inbox stored for future retrieval. The drama course proved to me to be walking backwards, since I did not believe that artists needed degradation to then be built back up again. Artists by nature must be individual and unique. After 4 months I dropped out, left a lot of money on the table as they say, and said goodbye to my friends, the early form of email, and Bridget (my girlfriend from Wisconsin.)

Later that year, after teaching spring skiing at Butternut and landscaping for the summer in Stockbridge, I ended up on an airplane to London. I watched rehearsals at the National Theatre for a play called Entertaining Strangers with Judi Dench, and directed by Sir Peter Hall. I ended up 4 weeks later enrolled in the three-year course at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. LAMDA. For a rebellious child I certainly ended up in a lot of Academies. I would watch from behind the stage as Tony Hopkins and Judi Dench played opposite each other in Anthony and Cleopatra at the National Theatre. I learned to be an English theatre actor. I lived there for 6 years, working on the stage.

Where are you living now?
After London, I made my way back to New York and, after a few years, landed in Hollywood. Film and TV is what I really love to focus on.

What are you doing now?
In January I have a project on IFC called The Spoils of Babylon, where I have a fun scene with Tobey Maguire. I also star in a film distributing worldwide called Dragon Day, about a Chinese Cyber-attack that implodes the USA, and the family that tries to survive it. Look for it in 2014 on all the usual Movie channels. Of course it’s already all over the Internet if you know how to get your hands on it. I also have a film coming out sometime in the late 2014/15 called Room 105, where I play opposite Lorraine Nicholson (who is Jack Nicholson’s daughter.) I just shot a TV pilot called Rolling and a TV show is being developed from my film Dragon Day. You never know what happens to these projects, but I hope you get to see my face more and more. Oh, and you may have seen me at your local ATT store over the holidays in a 1950’s throwback commercial. You can keep up to date with my work by liking my official FB page at facebook.com/EthanFlower.Official and at ethanflower.com

What are your plans for the future?
I am getting a little more into producing my own projects so that I have a little more control of the content of my work. So send me your scripts. I will be living and working wherever my craft takes me. Acting sometimes involves traveling but for now my wife and I live happily in the heart of Hollywood.

How do you think your time at BCD influenced the choices you’ve made?
BCD was a great environment in which to grow up. It was filled with thinking outside of the box, so I was able to nurture that side of my personality. I believe that BCD gave me freedom of thought and empowered me to believe I was indeed someone special with a unique personality, someone who had a right to be proud and stand up for my own unique choices.

What about your time at BCD are you most thankful for?
I was very lucky when I was very close to being expelled. I was in eighth grade and a troublemaker by nature, always going against the grain. Although I was of generous spirit, I would often find myself in fistfights. More often than not I felt the harder end of the punch or kick, and would generally give students and teachers a run for their money. Having the last name of Flower in the 70s wasn’t the easiest thing to deal with as a boy. I can’t remember exactly what it was that landed the feather onto the camel’s back, but it was Sir James Fawcett (he should be knighted) who played Akademos and saved me by pleading my case. I am very thankful to him for seeing beyond my rebellious antics, and understanding that I was indeed an intelligent and creative kid. So my olive fields grew protected and I graduated smiling from BCD.

What advice can you offer current students at BCD?
Enjoy and trust in the brilliance of your individuality, even if it gets you a little close to the edge. We are all truly original, and bring good forward momentum and change to the world.Ethan Flower, Class of 1983