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.