Ginger Kid

by Steve Hofstetter

  If I thought the lobby of the NHL was impressive, you can imagine how I felt the first time I stepped into a professional locker room. I took copious notes during the game and stuck my recorder in the face of anyone who was talking. And, feeling bold, I even interviewed a few people who weren’t talking until I asked them to.

  While waiting for the players to finish showering and come out for interviews, I approached two celebrity fans. They were standing in the interview area, so I figured they were interested in being interviewed.

  The first fan was New York Jets wide receiver and number one–overall draft pick Keyshawn Johnson. Johnson flatly (and rudely) turned me down, even going as far as to call me kid. And not in the endearing way that Superman said it to Jimmy Olsen.

  Hurt but not broken, I walked over to Hanging with Mr. Cooper star Mark Curry, who couldn’t have been more gracious. Mark gave me plenty for my story and was just a general pleasure to be around. Eight years later, I found myself opening for Mark at a comedy club in Atlanta. I told the crowd the story of meeting him and ended my set by saying that I learned two lessons that day.

  “One,” I said, “is be nice to everyone. You never know who is going to be introducing you in the future.”

  “Two,” I continued, “Keyshawn Johnson is an asshole.”

  I wrote about the Knicks experience for Kenneth, who gave me half his column that week. The column did well, and Kenneth scheduled me to cover another Knicks game and a Rangers game. The word got around school pretty quickly that I was hobnobbing with (being ignored by) celebrities, and I was offered a column in my school paper, too. Suddenly, people who’d never cared what I had to say now voluntarily read it. Most of my classmates still ignored me, but I didn’t mind. I was being ignored in the locker room by much more important people.

  After some successful columns, I was offered a spot at the Columbia Scholastic Press Association’s (CSPA) fall conference. CSPA is an organization that honors the best in high school journalism and offers seminars about every aspect of student journalism. I’d never heard of it until one of my editors asked me if I wanted to go. Sure, I thought. Why the hell not. The Kinnus turned out pretty great—I’d give this a try, too.

  Columbia was a few blocks from Kenneth Clement’s office, and I was already thinking about applying to Columbia for college. I didn’t want to (read: was too scared to) leave New York, which mainly left me Columbia and NYU if I didn’t want to go to a school in the city university system. Everyone in my family for three generations had gone to a city university, and I wanted to forge my own path.

  Every senior at Hunter was given a college counselor, and I had drawn the short straw of Mrs. Vega. Students passed Mrs. Vega stories down every year; her ignorance was legend. There was the story where Mrs. Vega asked a student who got a perfect score on his SATs what his breakdown was. Or the story where Mrs. Vega recommended that a girl interested in Judaic studies forsake Brandeis for Notre Dame. I refused to believe those stories were true. How could anyone that oblivious be responsible for the future of such bright students? I don’t know how it was true, but it was true.

  The day I learned that you don’t have to respect all your elders was the day I sat in Mrs. Vega’s office and she insisted that I check out Northwestern University. I had told her I was interested in journalism, but I had also told her I didn’t want to leave New York. Mrs. Vega made me promise I’d at least research Northwestern, so I said yes, and she proceeded to look up Northwestern by searching for Chicago in a guide to American colleges. A guide that was divided by state.

  Mrs. Vega flipped through rapidly, unable to find the listings for Chicago.

  “Colorado. Delaware. Why can’t I find Chicago?”

  “Well,” I said, holding back most of my laughter. “Chicago is not a state—Illinois is the state. But were Chicago a state, it would still not be located alphabetically between Colorado and Delaware.”

  Mrs. Vega asked me to promise not to tell anyone what had happened. I told her I wouldn’t, knowing that I would absolutely tell everyone, if for no other reason than to prevent such a disgraceful screw-up from happening to anyone else. Years later I learned that her gaffe was even worse than I thought. Northwestern’s main campus isn’t even in Chicago. It’s in Evanston.

  The opening event for CSPA was in Low Library Rotunda, the same space at Columbia where Pulitzer Prizes are awarded. I spent that day feeling wowed by everything I saw. I came back from CSPA and began my early-decision application. I knew where I wanted to spend the next four years of my life.

  The idea that I wanted to go to Columbia, after I’d started high school so abysmally academically, was a little crazy. But between Mr. Mikkelsen teaching me the pride of knowing the work, Mrs. Acker showing me the value of being prepared, and Kenneth Clement yelling at me about deadlines, my grades had been pulled up far enough that I had a shot. My SAT scores were great, and I had some pretty stellar extracurricular activities to include on the application, like improv, Brick Prison, softball, and the most prestigious and spectacularly impressive accomplishment of all, homecoming king.

  Unfortunately, Columbia agreed that my applying there was a little crazy, and I was not accepted as an early decision. I also applied to NYU, Syracuse, Sarah Lawrence, Stony Brook, and Hunter College. I didn’t particularly want to go to any of them, but I had to give myself options. And I applied to a second program at Columbia. Perhaps I should have considered Northwestern, too. I’ve always loved the great state of Chicago.

  The stress of waiting to find out where you’re accepted to college (or whether you’re accepted at all) is not something I would wish on anyone, even though everyone who applies to college has to go through it. Where you go to college can change the direction of your life in countless ways—from meeting a new group of friends to falling in love to walking into career opportunities, college is extremely important. And everyone just has to sit around and wait for months until they learn what the rest of their life is going to look like. At least I got to go to Knicks games in the meantime.

  There’s a movie called Sliding Doors that explores the idea that the simple act of missing a train could have a tremendous effect on your life. I often think about how different my life would be had the snowstorm not led me to USY. Or if the New York Times or the YMCA had called me back first. Or if I hadn’t agreed to go to the Columbia Scholastic Press Association. Or if I’d ever actually seen Sliding Doors instead of just figuring out the plot from seeing a few commercials.

  Here’s a sentence no one else has ever said—cleaning up after those ferrets was life-changing.

  THE DAY THAT WAS TEN MINUTES LONG

  It had been years since I joined the improv club. I’d been in a few hundred scenes, killing some and bombing others but always trying to learn how I could get better.

  One particularly memorable bomb was the time I tried anti-comedy. A game of questions was taking place in a proctologist’s office, and my scene partner started by asking, “Do you come here often?”

  I responded by asking, “What are you trying to get me to do, play some sort of improv game?” I thought it was a creative way to push the form of the game. But it went over as well as “Frankly, Scarlet.”

  Through my successes and failures, one thing I hadn’t done was perform improv in front of anyone who wasn’t in the improv club. I don’t count that day I did improv in USY, or my time in Brick. As well as those performances had gone, there is a difference between building a scene and having a scene built for you. And I did not have a leading role in those productions; I was just a brief cameo in someone else’s improv group.

  Occasionally, we’d have visitors during our lunch meetings. Sometimes my copresident, Paulina, had a friend swing by, but I didn’t count those occasions since that friend was Rebecca Chaikin.

  Despite how much the improv club practiced, we never thought to go public. But Paulina was friends with the class president’s girlfriend, Cathy, and Cathy asked Paulina if we wanted t
o participate in Arts Day. Arts Day was an annual assembly where students and faculty showcased the creative side of Hunter. It was the Freak Hallway’s day to shine. Well, not a full day—Arts Day was only an hour long.

  The events were pretty standard year after year: The Asian American Alliance performed a traditional dance. The music class played something on strings. And Hunter’s resident student R&B group, Dujeous, closed and brought down the house. The problem was that most members of Dujeous had graduated the year prior. So Cathy was left with a slot to fill.

  When Paulina brought the idea to us, the club was a mix of thrilled and terrified. It was one thing to do these games in front of each other—it was another thing entirely to try them in front of an audience. We were afraid that the audience would be filled with people who didn’t appreciate good improv. In other words, an audience that didn’t get our inside jokes.

  With any improv troupe, punch lines can often become a string of private jokes. Scenes can become references to specific improvisers—or worse yet, references to jokes from previous scenes. Private jokes are a ton of fun when you’re just messing around. But they’re terrible traps to fall into when you’re performing for strangers—or worse yet, people you know personally, but who don’t get your references. People you know personally who don’t get your references and whom you have to spend the next few months with.

  “Wait a minute,” one of the students said. “Arts Day is next week!”

  As the club started freaking out about whether we’d be prepared or not, I spoke up.

  “Why do we need to prepare?” I asked. “It’s improv.”

  All we really needed to do was to choose the game that we’d play and the people who would play it. We decided that the players would be the three seniors. We were the oldest, we were the most experienced, and we were the ones who got to choose who represented the group. That was settled, so it was time to choose the game.

  World’s Worst was high risk–high reward. The audience shouts out a profession, and three people take turns acting as if they’re part of that profession. So if they shout “gynecologist,” we take turns saying things like, “Has anyone seen my ring?” World’s Worst is all one-liners, so a good joke hits incredibly hard, but it’s very easy to misfire.

  Superheroes is longer-form improv, where each actor is given a useless superpower and everyone has to build a scene together as they try to save the city. So, the Girl With No Hair finds a creative way to use her bald head against her enemies, and the Guy with Two-Dimensional Vision creates the physical comedy of feeling around until he’s caressing his colleague’s bald head. The problem with Superheroes is that it takes a while to build the scene, and we didn’t have an audience willing to give us leeway. Performing comedy for a crowd that didn’t intend to see you perform is a tough proposition. We had to get their attention quickly.

  We settled on Party Quirks, a game that can impress crowds both with comedy and with a player’s ability to read the scene. Three guests are given strange quirks (like Superheroes), and the host of the party has to guess what those quirks are. So the guy that thinks all food is too hot starts freaking out about the salsa, but then also about how spicy the water is.

  Party Quirks also comes with a great deal of audience participation because the crowd suggests the quirks, and they all know what the quirks are, but the host doesn’t. It creates a very fun vibe of people wanting to yell at the host when the host doesn’t guess quickly enough. And people are extremely impressed when the host nails it immediately.

  We added a junior as our fourth player, and I was picked as the party host. I’d played the Party Quirks host a hundred times in our little classroom and rarely got stumped. This was my best game.

  Arts Day came, and after a traditional dance for Chinese New Year and a cello performance, it was our turn. I was taken outside the auditorium while the rules were explained to the crowd, and then I was brought in to host the party. The irony of me hosting a party was not lost on me.

  The quirks were easy, and I guessed all three of them right in all three games. If anything, we went too quickly—the hints came too fast and my guesses came too quickly. We were so intent on impressing everyone, we didn’t allow the scene time to breathe.

  But it worked. It worked so well that some people asked us if we’d planted the quirks in the crowd. That is the mark of a good improv performance—when people assume it’s so good that it had to have been planned ahead.

  Our lives didn’t change because of that performance. After that week, no one mentioned it again. But Arts Day showed me that I could handle myself in front of a real crowd, and it showed me that I was no longer scared of attention. I’d come a long way from the kid who refused to speak in economics class.

  I STOLE A PIMP

  Carnival always signified the home stretch of the school year. When I was a senior, Carnival signified the home stretch of my entire high school career.

  Even when I was in grade school, I dreaded most school-wide events. The problem with schoolwide events was that they required money. Every extra dollar I made babysitting was spent on clothing or food or other such silly luxuries. I hated book fairs and bake sales because I could never afford to buy anything, and the funnel cake at Carnival was usually no different.

  I’ve referenced my lack of money a fair amount in this book, and I want to be clear—we weren’t starving, but sometimes I was hungry. I was lucky that we had enough money to always have food on the table, though it was often canned tuna purchased with coupons. I had clothes on my back and a roof over my head, but the idea of being able to spend money on funnel cake was as alien to me as how funnel cake is made in the first place.

  Senior year, Carnival was actually different. I had the usual frustration of not being able to participate in the booths or go outside without having to slather myself in SPF infinity. But that was muted by the excitement of high school finally winding down. I could see the light at the end of the teenage tunnel. And I was okay. I’d found my friends, I’d shaped up academically, and Theo Webster never hurt me (other than emotionally).

  Part of Carnival involved the juniors unveiling their mascot. Instead of the school having one mascot for everyone, each grade had their own. I know that’s an odd tradition, but we didn’t have a homecoming game, so we had to invent our traditions where we could.

  Hunter mascots were always animals named with terrible puns. Ours was Karate Squid, which thankfully beat out Periodic Table of the Elephants. Karate Squid also beat out many other possibilities I don’t remember—only Periodic Table of the Elephants was dumb enough to stick with me.

  The junior mascot was Chimp Daddy and some of the students made a prototype by taking a giant doll and dressing it up in a fur coat and pink hat. After the pimp doll was carted off, everyone pretty much forgot about it because hey, funnel cake.

  Despite my lack of desserts, I sat on the school steps in a pretty good mood. All that changed when Ozzie gave me the “good” news.

  “You know,” Ozzie said, “Alexa Howard doesn’t hate you.”

  “Well then she’s a fantastic actress,” I replied, laughing.

  “She is,” Ozzie said. “She told me.”

  I stopped laughing. I was more confused than anything. I demanded Ozzie explain what he meant, since I knew Alexa had been unsuccessfully hitting on him for the last few months and he was privy to information. Ozzie had no interest in Alexa—he knew just how terrible she had been to me. But Ozzie rejecting her advances hadn’t stopped Alexa from trying. And the most recent time she tried to pique his interest was that morning at Carnival, where she confessed to him that she actually had no problem with me.

  “Steve’s a pretty good guy,” Alexa told Ozzie. “I see how he is with the team. He works hard, and he cares about us. But I couldn’t start being nice to him. What would people think? I have to keep up appearances.”

  What would people think? That she’d matured like the rest of us had? That she wasn’t pure evil
? That sometimes humans can change their minds about one another?

  Normally, I’d be happy to learn that someone who’d disliked me for years had changed her mind. But I couldn’t get past why she had treated me so poorly, for years, in the first place.

  She had been putting me through garbage because she thought it made her look better. I don’t know why she thought that—perhaps because being kind to me would have made her look soft. It didn’t make sense to me, but this was much worse than her just being mean to me because she hated me. The remarks she had for me, the names she called me, the academic sabotage—she put me through all that just because she wanted to look cool. Ozzie was wrong about this being good news. This was very, very angry news.

  As I stewed in my anger and wished I could silence it with funnel cake, I was given an opportunity. One of the Dans came over to tell us that the juniors had officially been given control of the senior class president’s office, and that was where they were keeping the pimp doll. Dan then asked if anyone would come with him to try to break in.

  Normally, I wouldn’t have said yes to breaking in to anything. It’s infantile and risky and doesn’t have much upside. But I was angry and hungry, and I wanted a victory.

  “I’m in,” I told Dan, knowing full well it was idiotic.

  I had a theory—we had keys to the newspaper office, which shared a wall with the senior class president’s office. And in that part of the school, the walls didn’t go all the way up to the ceiling. More importantly, the ceiling tiles were removable. When you spend years hiding in the nurse’s office staring at the ceiling, you learn a few things.