AUGUSTA — It was a night for humor, heart, advice and balloons.

“Don’t get killed by foreign drug lords. Don’t drive your car into the ocean. Go to the dentist,” Kyle Gordon told classmates.

From Oleg Wing: “We are the future” and “Don’t get your knickers in a twist.”

Oak Hill High School graduated 110 students Monday night in a two-hour ceremony in front of hundreds at the Augusta Civic Center. Every few minutes, high-pitched balloons shot over the heads of the graduates from Litchfield, Sabattus and Wales, wiggling in the air before floating back down on the crowd.

Sixty-nine of the students plan to go on to college, according to Principal Pat Doyle, and 16 plan to enlist in the military.

The evening included the school band, Voices of Color singers and awarding more than 30 scholarships.

When students handed out flowers to people who’d been important to them, English teacher and department chairwoman Patti LeBlanc held more than a half-dozen roses as student after student approached for a hug.

“They’ve all got a story to tell and they’re so much fun to be around,” LeBlanc said. “They’re musicians, they’re actors, they’re writers, they’re thinkers. They’re just great kids.”

The students were the only formal speakers during the ceremony.

Gordon, class salutatorian, said he’d been known as a perfectionist, and that was OK.

“I do what I do because I enjoy it,” Gordon said. “The joy in life comes from doing things you love, not doing things that others think you should do. For me, that’s been one of the hardest things.”

He plans to study music at Bennington College in Vermont in the fall.

Wing, class valedictorian, came to the U.S. from the Ukraine as a young boy. He plans to study at the University of Maine.

Wing said graduation felt like a moment that called for important advice but also used his speech to reflect something he’d been told before entering high school, that “the next four years would be the greatest time of my life.”

“I can honestly say, I hope not,” Wing said to laughter. There were small things he would change, but “more important is that reaching the peak now would seem entirely anti-climactic.”

“With regard to the future, I’m not entirely sure what to say, having not been there myself,” he said. “It is uncertain if there is a bright future out there or not, however there will be experiences. Hopefully entertaining ones. So best of luck, that’s it.”

kskelton@sunjournal.com