By 15, I was doing alright at State High. I’d made friends with my drawings (I was constantly giving them away whenever anyone said anything remotely complimentary about them) and through involvement with Thespians. I was being pushed by teachers in ways I hadn’t before. The school was vibrant and alive to me. Compared to Lehman, there was just so much to do. In summers and after school I could walk downtown and buy comics and cds and books. I got my favorite album around this time, too: Grace, by Jeff Buckley. I was a tenor, and Buckley was a tenor virtuoso. His songs, to me, sounded like what angels must sing to pass the time in their quiet moments. They were spiritual, theatrical, technically masterful and emotionally whalloping all at once.
I was headed off to Governor’s School myself the following summer, to study theatre. My sister (at this point a sophomore art major at Penn State) and I were headed in artistic directions. Our parents, both professional educators (Mom was still teaching English, now at State High, her alma mater), were incredibly supportive, in spite of the statistical improbabilities of either of us having financially sound careers in these disciplines. They believed in us, incredibly, and with their support we both flew with confidence.
My high school experience ended with an embarrassment of riches. I could never have guessed that everything that happened would happen. I was National Merit and won writing awards at the school and national level. I nailed a 5 on my AP English test without taking AP English (my foray into academic experimentation continued in my 12th grade year as I took an interdisciplinary course periods 1-5 that was team taught to include English, Social Studies, Science, Art and Vocational experiences). I played Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the monologue from that show got me first runner-up at the National Shakespeare Competition in New York City, where we performed onstage at Lincoln Center. I played Nicely-Nicely Johnson in Guys & Dolls and stopped the show with “Sit Down You’re Rockin’ the Boat.” I won the highest performance scholarship award at the annual Pennsylvania State Thespian Conference. I made state chorus as a Tenor 1. I got into Penn State’s Schreyer Honors College, which provided me with a four-year scholarship that, combined with the tuition break I got from my dad working there, made my college experience a virtually free one. I dated a former cheerleader named Courtney who’d shifted her focus onto poetry and art. I thought we made quite the pair. My parents, who’d insisted up until the day before my 16th birthday that I was not getting a car, found a safe old Volvo for sale in my neighbor’s backyard the morning of my 16th birthday. He gave them a great deal on it, and I paid my dad back for the car bit by bit.
My collection obsession shifted from comics to cds. I now had something like 500 cds. I think nearly every penny of my allowance went into buying music. I was so busy with theatre that I had less and less time to draw, so my personal outlet shifted from drawing to listening to music. I made mix tapes for my friends all the time, and was quite proud of how much my friends seemed to like them.
I was a definite “liaison” figure, a cliqueless butterfly in a class that had a lot of them, it seemed to me. We were 600 strong headed into graduation, and it seemed to me that I liked nearly all of my classmates fairly well. Some I knew well, others I knew tangentially. But I was the kid who always said hi, who always smiled, who always tried to have an uplifting thing to say or a sympathetic ear. I rarely sat with groups at lunch. I’d eat alone, and when I got food I’d stop and talk to most of the tables I walked past, or at least wave hi to somebody. I almost never took study halls – I was always off doing this or that for Thespians or some other artistic or academic adventure.
College was an extreme reality check in the opposite direction.
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