{"id":1989,"date":"2010-11-12T22:33:52","date_gmt":"2010-11-12T22:33:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/2010\/11\/12\/i_knew_her_when\/"},"modified":"2024-11-27T18:19:06","modified_gmt":"2024-11-27T23:19:06","slug":"i_knew_her_when","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/2010\/11\/12\/i_knew_her_when\/","title":{"rendered":"I knew her when"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/terQSB_u8qs?si=MyQz_Mv0uqHgY_Gd\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><strong>Long before autotune<\/strong>, that Oscar, little baby Apple, and even her <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=bv9CVuNRgCo\">duet with Huey Lewis<\/a>, young miss <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Gwyneth_paltrow\">Gwyneth Paltrow<\/a> and a few of her chums at the exclusive <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/The_Spence_School\">Spence School<\/a> on the upper east side of Manhattan planned a small production of <i><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/You%27re_A_Good_Man_Charlie_Brown\">You&#8217;re a Good Man, Charlie Brown<\/a><\/i> as a senior class project. I, ladies and gentlemen, was cast as Charlie Brown in that production.<\/p>\n<p>Spence was an all-girls school, so just like the <a href=\"http:\/\/regis-nyc.org\">all-boys school<\/a> I attended nearby, they had to recruit from other schools in the area to round out the cast if they put on a show. (This is a big reason why it wasn\u2019t considered that faggy to get involved with the theater in single-sex schools: it was an effective way to meet suitors. That also made it good camouflage if you were just a typical teenage musical-theater fag.) After seeing a flyer for auditions at Spence appear in the locker room one day, my pal <a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/name\/nm0125296\/\">Neil<\/a> and I went slightly further uptown and were soon cast as the male leads.<\/p>\n<p>Sadly, the show never made it to the stage. After a few rehearsals held at Spence and in the sprawling 5th Avenue apartment where one of the girls lived, we stopped hearing anything from the girls. One of them had a little brother at our school, and he sheepishly asked us to return our scripts because the show was cancelled.<\/p>\n<p>A lot of the details of this are all very fuzzy now: I can\u2019t remember what I sang at the audition, and even though I know Neil was going to be Snoopy, I\u2019m not totally sure what part Gwyneth had. If I\u2019d have <i>known<\/i> one of us would become famous I might have retained more. But it wasn\u2019t until many years later that I connected that chick who was in that movie with the teenager I knew a little who had an actress mother named Blythe Danner whose name only barely rang a bell. I recall Neil saying he wasn\u2019t that interested in her, since her classmate Gretchen \u2014 the one with the brother in our school \u2014 had much more impressive tits. I was convinced all along that I would never see these girls again, anyway, since they were obscenely wealthy and moved in different circles altogether. Spence was, after all, one of the inspirations for the school in <i>Gossip Girl<\/i>, and I was definitely just a working class art nerd.<\/p>\n<p>Random bits of loosely related trivia that have occurred to me while writing this:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Fellow type designer <a href=\"http:\/\/typography.com\">Jonathan Hoefler<\/a> \u2014 who I only met a couple of years ago \u2014 went to another school in the neighborhood at the same time. I don\u2019t think he ever met Gwyneth, but he made much better use of his experiences working on the school newspaper and\/or yearbook.<\/li>\n<li>Aside from one show my freshman year of college, I never really bothered with performing after that. Neil, however, did go on to try his hand at acting, and it was always funny to see him turn up unexpectedly as a bit character in the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/name\/nm0125296\/\">occasional film<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>I once met <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Anthony_Rapp\">Anthony Rapp<\/a>, who played Charlie Brown on Broadway. It was a totally random handshake sort of meeting, during which I never got the chance to mention that I had been in his apartment earlier that year, helping a mutual friend feed his pets while he was out of town. Anthony was introduced to me by his boyfriend, with whom I had shamelessly flirted some months earlier.<\/li>\n<li>I am not the gayest gay the Jesuits at my high school ever sent forth into the world. That honor belongs to another Oscar winner \u2014 <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Bill_condon\">Bill Condon<\/a>, writer\/director of <i>Gods and Monsters<\/i>, <i>Dreamgirls<\/i>, et al.<\/li>\n<li>Do you know who else was a total east-side private-school theater fag who was in a bunch of musicals at my high school (long after my time)? The girl who would one day become <a href=\"http:\/\/nymag.com\/arts\/popmusic\/features\/65127\/\">Lady Gaga<\/a>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Long before autotune, that Oscar, little baby Apple, and even her duet with Huey Lewis, young miss Gwyneth Paltrow and a few of her chums at the exclusive Spence School on the upper east side of Manhattan planned a small production of You&#8217;re a Good Man, Charlie Brown as a senior class project. I, ladies &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/2010\/11\/12\/i_knew_her_when\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;I knew her when&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1989","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ultramedia","category-ultrapersonal"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1989","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1989"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1989\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":71385,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1989\/revisions\/71385"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1989"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1989"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1989"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}