Stereotypes sell. Pop culture thrives by creating predictable characters who strictly adhere to the stereotypes they were written to represent. Unfortunately, however, there are numerous parallels between these one-dimensional characters and real life. In fact, when someone foreign to the North Shore of Chicago questions me on what my hometown is like, I ask, "Have you ever seen the movie Mean Girls?" Not only does the film take place in a northern Chicago suburb, but its satirical nature is a...

Advanced Study in Theatre Arts is listed on my senior year transcript. In this course, I am acting as “senior teacher” for the Technical Theatre I class. Deerfield High School offers a program which pairs seniors with teachers to assist in teaching a class. In most cases, a senior will be placed in a physics or math class and will be responsible for answering simple questions and grading tests. As I am the first ever senior teacher in that class,...

I’ve lived on a campus all my life. Well, it’s not a campus in the usual sense, but it feels like one. I know everyone and everything on it. There is no adventure, no discovery. I want to know what it feels like to get lost. I want to just wander and never see someone I’ve met. Stephen Sondheim once wrote about a city. When he referenced it, he didn’t talk about its structures or restaurants;...

With packet in hand, I arise from my seat and take center stage. The theatre director looks me over and asks, “Which monologue will you be reading, Mason?” I nervously answer, and as the lights burn through my skin and melt my bones, I recite a monologue from Dancing at Lughnasa—and this is how I didn’t make my first high school show. As any other 14-year-old freshman would be, I was crushed. This led me to try stage...

The jacket of my life story would read: The Not So Struggling Life of an Upper-Middle Class White Kid Living on the North Shore of Chicago. There. I said it. Truthfully, I don’t have it all that bad. Yet, I have discovered that the people in my community hold some of the most rigid ideas of what others should do with their lives and who they should be. You can imagine it came as quite a shock to my...

There is no such thing as a perfect run. However, some performances are more perfect than others. A prop falling mid-scene is far better than an actor puking right before his major song (side note: I’ve dealt with both of those things). Sometimes, though, a seemingly irreparable catastrophe strikes within minutes of house opening. To this day, two years later, we still don’t know exactly what was wrong. Sometimes, things just go kaput. The light board usually takes...