CHS dirt- For Tristan

Mostly this thread is for Tristan, as a continuation of a conversation in GD (I couldn;t email him!).

 I went to Cordova High School (yep, the one with the Lancers) and graduated in 1999. The Little Theater was considered where the weirdos hung out and was very gothic. They were considered drama people, but very few of them were actually involved in drama. My freshman and sophmore year, the LT lived in it's own special kind of glory. But it got taken a little too seriously by the people associated with it. That, and some key people graduating, led it to dissolve a bit. It was always there, but when I graduated it was more of a random assortmant of "wierd" people than any sort of cohesive group with a group identity.

Drama is a different story (I was REALLY active in drama). We got in a lot of debt and were doing some really lame stuff, but then we had some glory. In my Junior year we managed to work with the music department to do a musical, and it was a big sucess. In the years I was there drama went from a really outcast kind of thing to do to a rather admired department. The term “Drama person” stopped being an insult. In my senior year we did a version of “Midsummers Night Dream” adapted for children and “The Crucible”. A few years before we could have never found twenty people to even be in “the Crucible”, but we pulled it off and it was good. Heck, the captain of the football team played the fairy kind in “Midsummers night dream” and he even wore tights and lots of glitter. It was nice because the “mainstream” people stopped being so mainstream.
Unfortunately the year after I graduated they sceduled AP government for the same period as drama and there wasnt any new leadership to take over where we left off, so things fell apart.

But when I went there, at least, CHS was a great place to be “different”. I think a lot of that was the mix of people. Everyone that went to CHS grew up around so many people of different cultures and ethnicities that we got used to people being different, so it didnt bug people that so and so dyes her hair blue or otherwise acts different. And sports were on the back burner. Except for baseball they were all as underfunded as anything else. Senior year our football team didnt win a game, and a lot of the players were also AP students. Drama was strong, we had a thriveing litereary magazine (that promptly died when I left, ugh!) and our senior ball queen and king were people that would be normally considered “geeks”.

Maybe my class was a bit of an anomoly. For some reason the “geeks” were on top and the arts were respected. Suddenly it was cool to be in AP classes and okay to be involved in drama.

But yeah. CHS. Small world. Do you know what year the LT became the LT? It’s strange that it lasted so long.

Wow… seems like Cordova has changed quite a bit… but I saw that happening when I left… ah well…

My senior year was the year they enacted the ZTP (Zero Tolerance Policy). I and my partner in crime wrote several articles against it, and actually got hate mail from students for refering to CHS as Auschwitz high, although the picture we used, with a Nazi-esqe flag and barbed wire may have been the cause behind that.

I am good friends (now) with one of the prime reasons the lockers were taken away… a running gun-fight at the end of Ambassador… he’s better now… heheheh

Drama has always had problems, and I feel that part of that is the teacher, but that is purely personal.

It’s good to see the academic parts of CHS start to get the attention that then deserve… ever since the 70’s Cordova had been a sports school, and then in 94 is started to back slide really fast… it’s been a while since a CHS football team has had a good year, and both my brother-in-laws have played (both YArbers, one of them last year).

As I said, when I came in the LT was mostly a “rocker” hang out… as the seniors drifted aways, and the real losers dropped out, the make-up changed, and it was my senior year that I first heard the phrase “Little Theater People” or Little Theater Posse". By that time, it was already headed for goth-dom, partially fueled by us playing a version of Killer (see the thread on dumb HS games) that had a vimpire theme. I was known for climbing the amphitheatre wall and standing on the drinking fountain in front of the theater, doing Monty Python bits at the top of my lungs, and Jesus jokes.

When I left, it took a darker turn, with a wholehearted grab and run with the gothic concept… which would have been ok, but they started to exclude folks that weren’t like them. I was a bit annoyed by that, as I felt that the LT had been best as a place for any one who didn’t fit in to hang out.

Did you take Journalism? If you did, you may have gotten a Waldo Award… those are named after me, as that was my nickname at CHS… last I saw mr. wells and Mrs. Malaspino still remembered me by site, even thought I graduated almost 8 years ago…

Hope to get mail from you soon!!!