I have a notoriously bad memory. Sometimes I'm amazed I can remember what happened the week before. Unless I've written it down some where, or there's video evidence of what happened, I'm hard pressed to tell you when something occurred. I think it's because I choose to remember only things that happen out of the norm. You know, the things that stick out.
My time in high school gave me plenty of things worthy of remembering. Park West High School, on the west side of Manhattan, was a place with a not so good reputation. The school was a mixture of some of the roughest toughest kids from all five boroughs (by far the dominant borough in terms of share numbers was Brooklyn. The least was Staten Island, with only one kid from that borough attending the school). At least, that's how I remember it. To shade in the picture more clearly, there were other dynamics at play within the chemistry of Park West. There was, the aforementioned, roughest-toughest crowd (a racially diverse crowd), the geeks, the jocks (the basketball players and uh, the football "club"?, it was called a club because they didn't actually have a place to play football), and the kids just in the middle.
I'd like to think that I was a kid in the middle - not too geeky, not tough, just there. A middle kid in a high school like Park West could choose what memorable activities he would want to take part in. There were such exciting cultural experience like a race riot between the Spanish kids and the Black kids. You could work on your health with some cardio by outrunning the security guards. And if you needed some quiet time to work on you studies, "Catchmen" was your place (they called it Catchmen because that is what they do "Catch Men" who are cutting class). My school was one adventure after the next.
In my junior year (or was it senior?), I had an English teacher, Mr Shea, who got our class involved in a series of visits to the theater. Not the movies, the actual live actors, costumes, stage theater ( 'Theatre' if you're fancy). We would spend the class time reading classic plays like "Moliere" By Tartuffe, "A Cherry Orchard" By Chekhov, and "Romeo & Juliette" by Shakespeare. It was all thrilling for a budding actor (My junior year is when I started studying acting after school). Thanks for Mr. Shea, I was getting an infusion of culture that was energizing me, added fuel to my creative fire. But alas, I was still a Park West kid and my new knowledge was conflicting with my old Park Westy instincts.
Getting to go on one of these theater outings felt like a prison break to the entire class. We were all so excited. We got to leave the school, together, as one big amorphous blob of youth, hormones, noise bopping down the blocks of Manhattan toward the Cherry Lane Theater down on St. Marks.
Some friends and I would always sneak away from the group and buy food to eat during the performance. Invariably, It would me McDonald's or something. But one day, we decided to switch it up. This time we wanted something hardy, something flavorful, something....chicken. And it just so happened that a Dallas BBQ's was along the route to the theater. The play wouldn't be starting for at least a half hour, we had plenty of time to order our buffalo wings (my mouth is salivating just thinking about them) and go. By the time we got to the theater, our classmates had already found their seats, the lights were down, and the play already started.
Me and my two cohorts bumbled and fumbled our way to our seat, giggling along the way. Having successfully navigated the seating, we decided it was time to feast and delicately opened the wrapper covering the buffalo wings. The smell of the barbecue sauce and chicken filled the entire theater. Did we care? Hell no, we were young, dumb, and full of wings (you thought I was going somewhere else with that didn't you?).
I will always remember that day. Not just because it was sort of hilarious and exactly something a group of silly high school kids would do. I remember it because while biting down on one of my succulent tiny drum sticks, I had a flash of embarrassment. All the actors on stage were white, the audience was peppered with elderly white women. For a quick second, I thought, to these people I'm representing what young black youth are. Is this what I want that representation to be? While that thought was fleeting at the time, it's since come back to me over and over again along with the memory of that day.
Every time you step out of your house, you're representing something to other people, It's really not fair. Who wants to carry their entire gender, race, or socio-economic background on their back? That's a lot for anybody to bare.
Truth is, even without picking up the responsibility of being a symbol for other people, it's still thrust upon you. I didn't realize that when I was in high school but I do now (as an adult, isn't that the way it always works? ugh). I can't worry about what everybody else is going to do. I can't control the actions of anyone else. I develop my character - speech, posture, confidence - for my own self respect. Because how I do those things shows how much I care and love myself (got to love yourself first am I right?).
The things I remember in life are the things that stand out. It's the same with people. How you choose to be remembered is up to you.
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Special message to Park West High School : Thanks for the memories.
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