At that moment, they were all singing enthusiastically at assembly. Blending in wasn't easy for Maggie Rose, even though she desperately wanted to. She was the nine-year-old daughter of Katherine Rose, after all. Maggie couldn't walk past a mall video store without seeing a picture of her mother. Her mother's movies seemed to be on the tube about every other night. Her mom got nominated for Oscars more often than most actresses mentioned in People magazine.

Because of all that stuff, Maggie Rose tried to disappear into the woodwork a lot. That morning she had on a beat-up Fido Dido sweatshirt with strategic holes front and rear. She'd picked out grungy, wrinkled Guess jeans. She wore old pink Reebok sneakers-her “trusty dusties”-and Fido socklets picked out from the bottom of her closet. She purposely hadn't washed her long blond hair before school.

Her mom's eyes had bugged when she'd spotted the getup. She said, “Quadruple yuk,” but she let Maggie go to school that way anyway. Her morn was cool. She really understood the tough deal Maggie had to live with.

The kids in the crowded assembly, first- through sixth-grade classes, were singing “Fast Car” by Tracy Chapman. Before she played the folk/rock song on the auditorium's gleaming black Steinway, Ms. Kaminsky had tried to explain the message of it for everybody.

“This moving song, by a young black woman from Massachusetts, is about being dirt poor in the richest country in the world. It's about being black in the nineteen nineties.”

The petite, rail-thin music and visual arts teacher was always so intense. She felt it was a good teacher's duty not only to inform, but to persuade, to mold the important young minds at the prestigious Day School.

The kids liked Ms. Kaminsky, so they tried to imagine the plight of the poor and disadvantaged. Since the tuition at Washington Day was twelve thousand dollars, it took some imagination on their part.