This morning I dropped off Natalie at her improv class with Alec at Walden Theatre. Oddly, it wasn’t the first time I’d been back to Walden since high school, but it still held that feeling of nostalgia. Doubly strange was the fact that although Natalie’s not my kid, in a way she still represents the next generation of Walden nerds to grace that lobby. Today Charlie handed out an envelope of raffle tickets to sell for the chili supper in a few weeks and told the kids to hand them to their parents or whoever had brought them this morning. I was Natalie’s person. I was there as a grown-up, and it’s been several years, but there was a teeny part of me that still felt out of place. The fact that I was a sister amongst many moms was part of it, but part of it was reliving that old high school insecurity too.

I never attended classes or performed in a single play in Walden, but I still consider myself to be at least an adjunct part of it. We could never afford the tuition and didn’t bother with investigating financial aid, so instead I just hung out in the lobby and at rehearsal. I spent hours loitering in the parking lot and waiting for my friends to finish getting out of costume after performances in the MeX. Most of my closest friends during my last years of high school were affiliated with Walden in one way or another. As a gift, Katya bought me one of the Walden hoodies and sewed on letterman jacket style letters to the back that said “GROUPIE.” I cherished that sweatshirt and barely took it off until less than a week later, when I left it in a movie theater and never saw it again, despite many return visits to the Tinkletown lost & found.

A lot of the teachers and staff just knew me as “that kid” that was always around, and if it wasn’t for the diehard friendships I was forming at the time, I would have felt like a pathetic loser. I worried a lot about being an outsider at Walden, but the thing was, in high school I already felt like a pathetic loser so it didn’t feel like much of a sacrifice to slough off a little pride in order to spend time with the kids that actually were in the cast.