Teenage Rampage

We were heading back from the coast, or possibly Victoria, somewhere adding up to three or four hours on the road. We were hungry so we stopped off at one of those little towns, one long street, a water tower, and just the single Mexican diner - which is so weird as to border on scary for our corner of Texas; and that's where we were when we received the news of the beginning of the end.

'You've got to be kidding me,' said Bess, glaring at her smartphone. It was an email from the school. Junior had volunteered to take part in an after school stage production of Disney's Frozen. My first thought - or at least the one most reminiscent of Hank Hill reacting to Bobby's latest terrible brainwave with characteristic resignation and disappointment - had been that Junior was eighteen years of age, and here he was helping to mount a production of Frozen. I was a full year younger when I took drama 'O' level at the South Warwickshire College of Further Education in Stratford-upon-Avon. Frozen wouldn't be invented for another thirty years, obliging us to study Georg Büchner's Woyzeck, Jarry's Ubu plays, Ibsen's Enemy of the People and the inevitable bits and pieces from Shakespeare. At the end of the year we staged a play called Victory For Who? about the aftermath of the first world war and the psychological toll taken on surviving combatants. We'd written it ourselves so it was ham-fisted and overly earnest, but as I say we'd written it ourselves, my point being that it wasn't our version of - off the top of my head - the Wombles movie.

Anyhow, I'd accepted that the kid had involved himself in something which, I suppose, at least wasn't My Little Pony, undertaken as a populist after-school activity rather than as part of an actual drama course. Now I recognised the potential for additionally depressing aspects of the enterprise coming to our attention. They were asking for volunteers among the parents of those involved. We could help sell tickets, or we could work at the concessions stand. If we didn't want to volunteer our free time, that was okay too, the email proposed, going on to detail the sums of money we would be expected to donate if we didn't want to work for free at a student production of fucking Frozen.

These were somehow the options. This is how America works.

'Fuck off,' I proposed with absolute sincerity. I feel I've always had a well developed sixth sense for enterprises to be avoided, and this was one of them. Bess felt the same, recalling her mother's advice - don't ever volunteer for anything.

Nevertheless, here we are a month later turning up at the school wearing Frozen t-shirts. We've volunteered for four sessions of one hour each over two weekends - Friday and Saturday. I've volunteered because if my wife were to go it alone, they would ask her to cover eight hours rather than four, which would additionally mean working concessions in the school canteen, selling fizzy drinks and potato chips to other parents. The American version of the word volunteer has quite a different meaning to that which I learned in school.

Typically, there isn't much to do given that the ticket sales are mostly online and the parents are generally capable of grabbing their own copy of the programme from the stack we've left on the table. Someone whom I later identify as Maya's mother suggests I stand in front of the door to the auditorium to prevent anyone going in before the kids have finished setting up; so I put on my reflective sunglasses, do the face, cross my arms, and here I am working the door at a high school production of Frozen.

 

A couple of weeks later, Junior brings home a DVD of the production. He served as stage hand and scene shifter so didn't actually appear in the production itself aside from taking a bow at the end; but we watch it anyway because he's keen for us to do so. If you haven't experienced Frozen, the story tells of a couple of castle dwelling Princesses, one of whom has powers similar to those of Iceman from the X-Men for no adequately explained reason. The two Princesses fall out with each other, a snowman inexplicably comes to life, and then the two Princesses get married, although not to each other, obviously; and definitely not at this school which is definitively Catholic and has banned use of the word gay alongside all references to homosexuality in both the curriculum and the library.

It's only fair really. When I first discovered the art of Aubrey Beardsley, for example, I was taking it up the pooper for the next six months before I even realised I was entirely heterosexual, by which point it was too late and I already had the gay plague.

Not really.

Returning to the main point, Frozen doesn't really have a story as such, just a sequence of loosely related occurrences punctuated by singing. We watch the DVD of Frozen as a family, all three of us. It's better than I expected, if a bit long. It still doesn't have a story, and it isn't Woyzeck, but is in all other respects a professional production. Junior and his pals have worked hard and produced something which, if anything, significantly improves on the Disney movie by virtue of hand crafted authenticity and gallons of adolescent enthusiasm.

Junior, it turns out, is full of surprises.

He joined the school drama group about a month before Frozen. He's told us he probably would have joined earlier but for the coronavirus having kept most of them at home for the best part of the last two years. The most surprising thing of all is that he now has a circle of friends, contrary to our understanding of him as not particularly sociable. It appears that our records are out of date.

The school year ends with a drama group showcase. It mostly turns out to be kids singing songs from the unambiguously heterosexual world of musical theatre; and we attend because Junior has come up with a turn of some description, announcing that he will be singing and performing just one day before the event is scheduled. Neither my wife nor myself have ever heard him sing, and his performances have been esoteric at best. The evening, when it arrives, is dominated by a student I'll refer to as Miranda after Colleen Ballinger's grotesque creation. They can't seem to keep her off the stage for longer than five minutes and while she puts her everything into her performances, her voice is technically competent but unremarkable or - to paraphrase what some journalist once said of Tony Hadley - there's nothing wrong with her voice, and that's what's wrong with her voice. She delivers one show tune after another, each somehow projecting the idea that this is a treat for the rest of us, which it isn't. Maya, who somehow ended up with a fairly minor role in Frozen, has a genuinely astonishing voice; and Colton, another of Junior's new pals, has a truly astonishing stage presence, coming over like a young American version of the Shend from the Cravats - which wasn't anything I saw coming. Junior himself gives a similarly gothic performance in top hat and theatrically dusty undertaker clobber, growling his way through Friends on the Other Side from The Princess and the Frog - whatever that is - even tailoring the number for his audience, pointing his walking cane at someone he thinks is probably me and asking, 'you do have a soul, don't you, Lawrence?'

The weeks which follow comprise the end of his school year and this stage of his education. He graduates and a succession of parties follow, more than I ever attended at that age, and I honestly would have had trouble filling the guest list had I been the host. Colton's party is in New Braunfels so we drive our boy out there one Saturday afternoon. They swim in the pool and watch DVDs. Miranda suggests they watch a DVD compilation of her own most recent performances, although I gather they settle for Beetlejuice which is Colton's favourite movie.

Sam has a party.

Colton has another party.

Emily has a party. I think her name is Emily.

Parties are thrown by other kids whose names I can't remember because there are too many of them. Junior, who stayed in his room for the best part of a year and seemed happy to do so, attends each one.

Eventually it's his turn.

He hosts the party at his father's house because Byron is a seasoned party host of many years standing and doesn't have four million cats. The day arrives, as do almost all of the drama kids with the notable exceptions of Maya and Miranda. Bess and I show up with a cake and find the guests all hanging around the front room playing with their phones. Byron has the grill fired up and will eventually cook crab, shrimp, potatoes, corn and so on, but right now he's fussing around in the garden, sorting everything out. We do what we can, hauling ice boxes, napkins or plastic forks from place to place, decluttering the table of decorative features provided by one relative who seems to believe our boy is still five and thought she was helping. There was some kind of banner which Junior himself discreetly removed a little earlier, something to do with Finding Nemo. We're left with plastic starfish and twee gnome figurines formed from seashells. The nautical theme relates to both the menu and the fact of our boy intending to study marine biology come September. The gnomes stay, possibly for ironic reasons.

The kids emerge from the house as the evening begins to cool. We mix non-alcoholic cocktails for them as they take their places around the table and resume fiddling with their phones. Ray, who resembles Dustin from Stranger Things, is wearing a Ramones t-shirt, which impresses the hell out of me - although it admittedly doesn't take much. Ray performed his own songs for the drama group showcase, singing and accompanying himself on both piano and guitar, although obviously not at the same time. One of the songs - presumably his own composition - was effectively a protest song endorsing same sex attraction and all that good stuff, running in dramatic contrast to official school policy. I was half waiting for security guards to rush the stage and shut it all down.

Before we leave I tell Ray that I was the only kid at my own school who listened to the Ramones, all those centuries ago. It actually isn't a metaphor for anything, but I think he appreciates it on some level.

It's June and school is over, and it's been a strange end to the scholastic year, albeit in a good way, none of which was predicted by anything in the endlessly stuffy graduation speeches. Our nineteen-year old sits at a table playing with his phone in the company of his peers, because they're now peers rather than other kids from school. He already knows what he'll be doing in September and is looking forward to it. He's weird and awkward, but nothing like so awkward as I was at the same age; and he has more friends now than I probably had until I was in my thirties; and the parties I attended were horrible. We had booze and all the other stuff with which one is expected to engage as a teenager, but we also had monosyllabic sculpture students sniffing marker pens and some raggedy looking arsehole doing hot knives in a hygienically questionable kitchen. Times have changed, and at least some of it has been for the better.