Where I Went to High School: Sunnydale High

Go SHS Razorbacks!

No, I'm not actually saying that I attended a fictional High School in an imaginary universe surrounding the events of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (aka "The Buffyverse"). But, If you really must know, I attended Patuxent High School in Lusby, Maryland.

PHS was a fine school, especially for a public one, where I participated in a number of programs ranging from soccer, cross country, and track and field, to the band program and everything involved therein. Starting junior year, I even had a fairly healthy social life and walked away with (arguably) acceptable social skills. But, that's pretty much what I have to say about that experience. I'm not very sentimental about the past. I believe in learning from mistakes, looking forward, and moving upward. I am far more interested in the stories of others than I am my own, fictitious or not. Also, most anything about you wish to know about that particular school has already been spelled out in wonderful detail here, written by personal O.G. and fellow Gent. B. Graham. I'll leave the personal details to those who where there and those who currently involve themselves in my life.

Regardless of its existential definition, I still managed to spend considerable time at Sunnydale High - typically once a week on Tuesdays from the hours of 8 pm to 9 pm*. Of course, these forays were private. I had been a closeted Buffy geek since the show first aired (while I was in middle school) and I didn't find anyone with whom I could share my fandom until a year after Buffy finished its run. Given, I also didn't tell many people about it - being male, straight, six-foot two, sixteen years of age, an athlete, and capable of growing a full beard in a week made my Buffy-love seem kind of out of place to everyone else. Anyone who found out would squint their eyes, tilt their head for awhile, and then their face would light up like they just figured out a $1 million question as they asked, "It's 'cause she's hot, right?" Admittedly, that didn't hurt (although, I was more of a Faith fan, truth be told). But, what can I say? I love vampires, strong-yet-flawed female leads, clever dialogue, and well-developed, relatable characters. And, that pretty much explains my man-love for Joss Whedon. But, I digress - when talking about Buffy it all inevitable boils down to one argument - should Buffy have left High School? Or, more to the point, did Buffy lose its point once the titular hero graduated?

It's hard to argue against the fact that Buffy was firing on all cylinders during Seasons 2 and 3. It's core concept was great - High School is actually Hell. Sunnydale High was located directly above a supernatural hotspot called a "Hellmouth." Guarded by an unnamed, giant, multi-headed demon (referred to by fans as "the Hellmouth Monster"), the Hellmouth(s) forms where the boundaries between dimensions are particularly thin. These inter-dimensionally fragile places are spots of mystical convergence - pooling supernatural energies, attracting various demons, and facilitating other paranormal activity. Many of the mystical events and demons represent different problems your average teenager may have to battle and overcome - and thus you had your engine for the show. Female teenager fights various demons inherent to graduating high school and growing up. That's Buffy in a nutshell - well, until she graduated.

I will defend to this day that Buffy's graduation didn't actually ruin the show. But, it did make things harder. Season 3 had a (near**) perfect wrap-up and the final exchange between Oz and Buffy represented it perfectly:

Oz: Guys. Take a moment to deal with this. We survived

Buffy: It was a hell of a battle.
Oz: Not the battle. High School.

Obviously, challenges surmount when this whole idea jumps out the window. However, I don't think Buffy, at this point in time, inherently "lost" its engine. Engine loss is a mislabeling of what happened. Instead, I think this reaction concerned Buffy growing up, its engine along with it, and an audience reaction to a show that changes. Following high school, Buffy went to college and eventually became an adult, while the engine reflected this slow evolution - and some didn't like that.

I should admit, the new engine in Season 4 was a little less stable. "College on a Hellmouth" does have a harder time standing on its own two feet. But, while the Initiative's presence (an underground, government operation representing the adult realization of "not knowing everything that causes everything") functions as an (albeit farfetched) stabilizing force, Buffy still worked as Buffy. Problems still arose with which people through the ages of 18-21 had to deal and battle - Buffy at this point in time, was still breathing (heh). Joss and co. were able to crank out quality episodes and a cohesive story arc - marked with some of the most poignant moments of the series. Season 5 came around and the engine solidified around a single premise - preventing inevitable doom by an actual god - and ended strongly with Buffy's foreshadowed*** death. And then, UPN happened.

Buffy was supposed to end in Season 5, but was revived into Season 6 after UPN dropped a fairly large check on Whedon's doorstep - which can breed its own problems. Season 6 is a television anomaly because it had nearly no engine. Instead it relied on Sunnydale as a supernatural hotspot to push the general (emphasis on general) plot and three major themes - life is Hell, the aimlessness and loneliness of being a young adult, and discovering the aspects of life that are hard/impossible to control. You'll notice in this season the lack of a "Big Bad" - the primary antagonist being life itself for this season. It's a novel idea and I liked it, but listlessness does not translate well on television - especially if your engine is going to reflect themes as much as Buffy's tended. This is, of course, in addition to the criticism covering Buffy's change in demeanor and the overall dark premise of Season 6. Buffy had very much lost her way and all of this season was about Buffy slowly finding it again (i.e. not wanting to die). And then, Season 7 solidified again with another stabilizing premise, a return to high school to strengthen Buffy's engine, and a satisfying end to a 7-year series. Buffy had finally grown up and the show was officially done.

Buffy was a show about growing up, overcoming obstacles, and defeating your demons - even if it is Hell. It was a great show with a solid run that evolved over the course of time. Were there bumps along the way? Sure, but each season had a reason for watching, took risks, and succeeded in being a poignant, self-aware commentary on life. High school was definitely its heyday - no one's going to argue against that. But, it was also a show that grew along with its strong, quippy heroine. And, I really dug something like that.

* - covers the time during which Buffy aired during the first 3 years of the series, while Buffy attended high school. "Buffyverse" time, of course, extended to 8 pm - 10 pm on tuesdays - after Buffy graduated and Angel began its run.
**- in reference to Angel leaving. Also, I'm still waiting for the cookie dough to finish baking.
***- I had no idea until today that in Buffy's dream sequence with Faith in "Graduation Day," where Faith says, "Little Miss Muffet counting down from 7-3-0" was actually referencing Dawn's involvement in Buffy's death at the end of season 5. "730" is the exact number of days before the episode airs where Buffy leaps from the tower and dies again.

Where I Went to High School: SoMD*

When I was in high school mine was one of three in the county; it's one of four now. It had been built five years before my freshman year, and by the time I got there it was already overflowing with 200 more students than it was built to hold, and it had sank into the swamp about a quarter inch. Welcome to Calvert County.

The personalities of our three schools were predetermined: the northernmost school was built in the 70s with the ideology that windows are distracting and detrimental to the learning process, so the inside was dark and lit only by flourescent lights; the middling school (our rival) was the first high school of the county and built in the late 19th century, so there was constant construction and peeling paint; and the southernmost school (my alma mater) was built in the 90s with the new-age ideology that windows and open spaces are actually good for the learning environment. So my high school was, in a word, gorgeous; it was compared to a shopping mall by visiting students. It was also an extreme waste of space and money, so there were unusable seats in the auditorium and half-funded lab tables in the science wing.

I had the usual awkward high school experience I think, with high periods of silliness and notoriety (I got fired from the morning announcements and it is sometimes still brought up in conversation when catching up with old high school acquaintances), peppered with the occasional dramatic breakup or un-friending (before facebook!). My friends and I didn't drink or do drugs, a prevalent pastime in small-town America, so my high school memories are of parking lot dance parties after one of the thirteen-billion afterschool activities I was enmeshed in, bayside (or riverside, I can never remember which side of Solomons Island is which) picnics, a lot of loitering, and a LOT of driving around aimlessly.

I don't think my experience as an awkward, dramatic, self-centered, oddball teenager is in any way uncommon, but I often find that Hollywood seems to think so, and that irks me. Teenagers played by twenty-somethings often come off as smooth and experienced, but I am almost positive no teenager is without awkwardness, regardless of experience.

Obviously not every high schooler had "fairyland," an extensive playground in someone's backyard next door to the school, a popular class-skipping or sports team-running break hangout; or "the ghetto," the group of class trailers in the front parking lot put in place after the school ran out of room for trailers out back; or a school-wide inside joke about our crazy one-term Principal, who announced at the end of a long-winded speech on his first day that, "You don't mess with Libby, 'cause LIBBY DON'T PLAY," but everyone was sure awkward as hell, and that's kind of nice.

Comforting, even, knowing that some of my weirdest, most awkward moments ever can be retold and laughed [with] in the knowledge that everyone's got a story, like the time I asked a boy out by ambushing him and yelling that I was going to the movies (by myself) and did he want to go. Or the time my girlfriends and I skipped school to go shopping and I announced (loudly) in an upscale shoe store, "WHAT, DO THEY ONLY HAVE ONE OF EACH KIND??" Or the time my running buddies and I bowled each other over in a mad scramble to leap into the bushes and hide before the lacrosse team saw us all red-faced and sweaty. And the list goes on.

Oh, and to any former teachers who may come across the blogosphere and read this, I totally learned stuff, too. Like from my football coach/calculus teacher who punched holes in walls when he got excited about math, and my history teachers who made us climb under our desks and threw "shrapnel" at us to teach us about WWI and stole me from another class to put me on trial at a Red Scare hearing (and turned on the news on 9/11 because they knew how important it was, despite or to spite the administration's mandate to keep tvs turned off.) And the theatre teacher who made me realize what I wanted to do with my life, and the English teacher who still invites us over for tea every year. There's a whole other post in what some of my high school teachers did for me as a person, so I'll leave it at that.

My high school experience was a fitting metaphor for teenagehood, with awesomeness interspersed with absurdity and pain, and an overwhelming sense of relief that it's all over. Calvert County high school: God Bless Y'all Real Good.


*SoMD is what the natives affectionately call Southern Maryland, sometimes going a step further to call themselves SMIBs, or Southern Maryland InBreds. Clearly no one else is allowed to call us that but us.

Where I Went to High School: Saratoga Springs Senior High

Like most of my life up until that point, High School for me was briefly spent moving. My Freshman year was spent at Northmont High in Dayton, Ohio. I made a few good friends, but by and large hated it. Then, as we often did, my family packed up and moved away, this time to Saratoga Springs, New York. A little more than a week into the semester, I began my Sophomore year at Saratoga Springs Senior High.

There's a certain mystique to being the New Kid. You get to reinvent yourself in ways that wouldn't be possible around people that you've come to know for years. In Ohio, I started school the same day as everybody else and quickly became that nerdy kid from Arizona whom had never been to public school. I learned a lot of hard lessons there about the social scene. If not for a stroke of blind luck, I probably never would have made any friends during my two years there (not entirely true; I had friends in my neighborhood, but I almost never saw them at school). Within a week of being the bonafide New Kid, I had a date to the Homecoming Dance, one Krissy Dittmar, and had met Matt Williams, whom would become my longtime best-friend-and-collaborator.

Unfortunately, there's also a consequence to being the new guy in town. This is especially true in a community like Saratoga Springs, which is known more for attracting tourists than lifetime residents. The people living there had all grown up with each other since grade school, meaning the social cliques which had been established were ironclad by the time High School rolled around. As a result, I never actually settled in with one group. Where I spent my lunch (the surest gauge of which social circle you belong to) could change at any given time. One day I'd be sitting with Amber Hall, the girl nice enough to invite me to sit at her table after noticing I was alone. The next I'd be outside in the expansive open area in the gazebo which was a gift from the Class of 1998, hanging out with friends of Krissy's or talking wrestling and comic books with Matt.

Now, there are a lot of things I could focus on regarding High School. It was there I met Claire, whom, besides one brief relationship before her, was the only girl I actually dated in Saratoga Springs (funnily enough, I ended up dating 4 other girls from that school, but all years after I graduated). I could talk about my battles with Mrs. Finnegan, my Senior English teacher, on the proper interpretation of "Hamlet." There was also my ill-fated decision to run for Student Council President, which while I had flashy special effects and entrance music for, I neglected to write a speech.

Instead, I'll just touch on the theater. I had decided back then, long before (or after, since I had declared when I was 5 that I would be President one day) my political ambitions took hold, that I would become an actor. So naturally when auditions for the school production of "Grease" were advertised, I was all up in that. By all standards I've learned since then, my audition was positively atrocious. Fortunately, I'm very good looking, which was good enough to land me the part of Kenickie. However, Director Bob (Bob Berenas, whom I believe is still directing there today) had a keen enough ear to recognize that I can't sing to save my life, so Jason Gibbs was given the "Greased Lightning" song (when the cast sheet was posted, there was an asterisk and note next to my name which read "Not Singing "Greased Lightning").

"Grease" was tremendous fun. I probably decided then and there that I would continue to pursue theater, which I eventually earned by degree in. Though she hated me when we met (I was really weird, according to her, which is ironic because she is totally weird) the girl who played Rizzo, Joanna Koslowsky, ended up being my actual prom date in one of those life-imitating-art moments. However, even being a part of a cast and working with the same kids every day for hours at a time, I never really did break into their social circle. By and large the cast list was drawn from the Choraliers - the elite amongst the school choir - and they didn't have room for the kid who couldn't sing. Also, I was probably really weird.

The next two years I'd have supporting roles in "The Wiz," - during the course of which I met another good friend, Lindsay Shoen (she was the Wicked Witch), and then wrapped up High School with "State Fair." For the last one, I had joined the wrestling team before auditions began that year, and was informed a month or so in that the schedules for the two could not peacefully co-exist. I chose theater.

Saratoga Springs Senior High School afforded me an excellent education and some very memorable and life-long friends. Krissy got married and has a baby boy. Claire became a dentist and lives on Long Island. Matt still lives near Saratoga, and will be marrying his longtime girlfriend Cait in a wedding where I've been asked to be a groomsman - by the way Matt, we're going to have a talk about who the Best Man is. While I don't always keep in touch with the people I knew from High School, I try to catch up whenever I know one of them is around, or whenever I go back to Saratoga to visit. I don't even have time in this post - for the sake of keeping it somewhere within the realm of a readable length - to talk about everybody; Devlin, Alex, Phil, Sabrina, Katie, Alisa, Lena - all the people from High School whom had some bearing on my life afterward.

My High School is gone now. The year I graduated they began a massive new renovation project. That gazebo was torn down - in fact, the entire outdoor area was eliminated to make way for new classrooms. The theater is still there; I got to see my younger sister perform there for the school's annual French Night. That is the only part which remains recognizable to me. Everything else has changed completely. My teachers have left or retired, the rooms they taught me in are gone or changed. It would seem that in this aspect of my life, we both moved on. The only difference is that Saratoga Springs Senior High will make little distinction between one more pair of sneakers which tread its halls, whereas I know that in some way, I have been shaped by what happened during my time within them.

And that is where I went to High School.

30 Tiny Truths - 2

2. CAG347

Ari Levin's Lexus is the only license plate number I've ever memorized aside from my own.

I didn't have a car throughout high school - I actually didn't get my license until I was out in New Mexico, 18 and technically a freshman in college. But before then, I was the consistent passenger amongst my friends and Ari's car was my favorite ride. There were other good and memorable cars running the road in those days - Ami first had The Van, a giant steel tank that may or may not have been sold to be a cab in an african country after it was no longer in use here. Then The Rocket, a Volvo station wagon that began the long running tradition of Ami and I getting into a car saying 'let's bounce, homes.' And Jacob still has the Grand Marquis, Spoont. sticker attached and filled to the brim with stuff, a living remnant of those days.

But no other car was like CAG347.

The gold Lexus named Alexis with her leather seats, she was a home away from home for years.
Ari and I would take that car every weekend for the Friday Night Drive, a weekly tradition where we would visit our friends who couldn't leave the house for Shabbat - starting off with dinner at one, then the next, until we ended up at Cunningham's for a late night movie, me passing out in the passenger seat on the way home. We must have done this nearly every week for a year or more.

Or the 2am trips to Bistro Francais in Georgetown, when we once literally kidnapped Andrew Stiles from his doorstep and took him there for perfect French cuisine, him screaming the whole way there. Being followed by a police car on Christmas Eve one year, across three counties, through residential neighborhoods and a col de sac, just looking for a place to eat. Getting lost in Poolesville just to see where River Road went.

That car was my escape during endless fights with my parents - blasting The Offspring or the Chili Peppers with Miles and Ari as we sped from diner to diner - Silver, Broadway, Star - or nowhere in particular.

Ari was the driver of our group, going out of his way to pick up or take every one of us somewhere, another extension of his very selfless spirit. He never asked for gas money, never felt put upon, just drove around and did his friends a good turn. When his first senior jersey idea ('I have a room') was turned down, his actual jersey proudly displayed 'The Chauffer.'

I always said once I got a car I would pay it back and give as many rides as I could.
And so I do.
I love driving, and it's rare to find me in the passenger seat. But for Ari, for old times, I'll make an exception.

Ari lives in LA now, and the Lexus just recently died. He has a new car, one I won't have nearly the same relationship with, seeing it only once or twice a year.
But High School is best remembered in that car - late at night, windows open, singing with abandon.