Flashback Friday - Fighting Fire with Fire

I went to the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts as a vocal music major. We used to tell people, "it's like Fame, but we don't dance on the tables." Although, we did break out in song every now and then.

You would think that we'd all be totally stuck up, competitive, and crawling all over each other to be the best. We weren't. The school was still so new at that time, we were all just grateful to be there. I believe mine was the 4th graduating class - something like that. We had been the geeks at our previous schools that no one got. We were the ones who weren't interested in going to the football games (except for the band, maybe) and got excited when a Sondheim tour came to town. We were the people who wore black, but weren't into punk. We were the ones voted "Most Talented" in the junior high yearbooks.

Our high school finally gave us a place to belong, to talk about big band jazz versus jazz fusion, or whether Mozart or Beethoven was a better composer, or whether Andrew Lloyd Webber added value or too much commercialism to Broadway. We once had an hour-long discussion on what defined "classical" music. (I can only speak here about the music majors.)

Junior year, we had some new students come in. (At the time, the high school only went sophomore-senior year.) One new student wasn't quite acclimated to our culture yet.

We all had opportunities to do our best and worst work in our music class, and in front of everyone. Sometimes you rocked it, and sometimes you failed. Because we all knew that the next time we got up there could be the time for us to mess up royally, we were pretty supportive of each other when someone didn't do their best. We all critiqued each other's work in a constructive manner. And, to be fair, we were all so different that someone was always doing something that we personally couldn't do. We had gospel singers, opera singers, pop and Broadway singers. And we all were required to try different things that weren't really our specialty.

Come to think of it, it's a bit like the blogosphere. We all have things in common, but different experiences and background. With a few exceptions, what I've experienced here is the most akin to what I experienced there; a chance to support each other, and learn from each other.

Anyway...I'm so dragging this out, aren't I? One of the new juniors just didn't get it. She decided to pick on me. She made really rude remarks about one of my solos in a way that just wasn't necessary. No, it wasn't my best, but I was working on it. Her remarks didn't scare me; they just ticked me off. They ticked off my friends, too.

From then on, we made her life miserable. We'd critique her work so thoroughly that there was nary a breath left that we hadn't commented on (all the while doing it "constructively" so that there wasn't anything our professors could find wrong with what we were doing). We'd make catty remarks as she passed us in the halls. We definitely left her out of our reindeer games (Heathers? Anyone?).

A couple of months of this, and by the semester break, she decided to go back to her neighborhood school. I can't say I'm proud of it, but at the same time, I really had no idea that we'd had such an effect on her!

Cut to a few months later. I was working for one of those dinner cruise ships out of Los Angeles Harbor. One of the musicians and I started flirting. He asked me out. We had a good time. Before we had a chance to proceed from there, we ran into each other at some show. It came up then that I was going to LACHSA. He started talking about his niece who went there. Yep, it was her!

Funny, he never asked me out again!