honky cracker: Katprints I showed up to the Greater Hartford Academy of the Performing Arts an unknowing, unaware, aloof sixteen year old raised within the confines of a town known only as Plainville, Connecticut.
The town lived just as its name suggests. Plain. Ville. Connecticut. Nothing out of the norm. We study. We athlete. We get by so one day we can get by. There's no water in this town, so let's not make a wake.
I lived somewhat meloncholily on the periphery of Plainville's inner sanctum. As a student in the accelerated track since 3rd grade, I hob-nobbed with the sons and daughters of the town's elite. Granted, the town's elite consisted of the Plainville Chamber of Commerce -- not exactly the Rockefellers and the Carnegies of the world -- but, nonetheless, the kingfish in a small Connecticut town pond. I was the grandson of the town's best known postman, the granddaughter of the cafeteria lady, and the son of two people no one ever gave a damn about.
Needless to say, Plainville was not the place for me. Somewhere along the way, I got myself away from Plainville and into the underground central Connecticut theater scene.
Some kids skateboard to escape their upbringing. Some kids smoke cigarettes and dissociate from everything around them. Other kids throw themselves into the athlete/cheerleader lifestyle in search of a place of their own.
Me, I did theater. I did music. I learned to play keyboards and write songs. And somehow, I got pretty good at all of those. Good enough, at least, to get accepted into Connecticut's premier (and only) performing arts high school.
So I left. Junior year, 1993. I walked away from all the little townie things I had ever known into the haven where all the artsy-fartsy outcasts -- the goths, the jazz kids, dancers and theater prima-donnas -- went to escape the mundane insurance-city parents life they were brought up in.
I didn't know anyone my first day. I was a square thrown into a high-school counterculture of hippies, punks, and drama-queen dancer misfits who had nowhere else to go.
I was square. Right angles at every corner. Throw a suit on me and I was ready to sell insurance to any young couple who just bought a house. I was less cool than a pot of coffee at Max Bibo's Deli.
Yet as I walked into the Academy for the first time, I was clutched completely unawares by a girl dressed in a black shirt and plum skirt, with deep purple lipstick which matched her hair, and earrings depicting the symbols of both male and female sexuality.
She grabbed onto me and wouldn't let go.
"Hi," she said with an almost foreshadowing glee. "My name is Kat, and I'm a voice major this year. Who are you?"
Quickly and nervously I introduced myself as Chris, this square from Plainville who just walked into this weird new world of vocation-based high school.
"Well, Chris. It's nice to meet you. Welcome to the Academy."
Kat showed me around the building as quickly as she could. Orientation would begin soon, and she had a lot of ground to cover. (The Academy was housed in a former morgue, so the building had lots of interesting nooks and crannies. Her old dance studio, she told me, used to be the room where the bodies were embalmed and made up to look pretty before the funeral.)
Kat gave me a whirlwind tour which lasted close to ten minutes. Then we had to part. Damn. For a moment there, I lost myself. Finally, I found a new person in a new place away from the crap I had known my whole life, and now she was taken away from me.
However, she wasn't taken away from me for long, as I soon found out that she was in both my main voice class and my music theory class.
Long story short, Kat was in two of my major classes. So I was going to be around her quite a bit. This made me happy. Very happy. I wouldn't be so alone in this weird, strange new place after all.
The first few weeks went by. I made some more friends. Everything was peachy-ish. But still I felt like an outsider. All the people who had been there for a while had their own friends. I was new. I was fresh meat. I was the newbie.
One day in early October of 1993, Kat and I were chillin' in the back of our music theory class. She had a sharpie with her. She began to draw Katprints all over my Chuck Taylors. I played it cool, of course. Anything and Academy vet wanted to do was okay by me. But eventually I looked over at her, cuz hey, someone was drawing all over my sneakers.
"Oh, I hope you don't mind. I just wanted to draw Katprints on your shoes."
Of course I didn't mind. There was Kat -- something new, something completely foreign to me, her own creature who really didn't give a damn what people said about her (a trait I had just begun to admire in people) and she wanted to leave her mark on MY shoes!
"No, please," I said to her. "Keep drawing. I love your Katprints."
Music theory came and went that day. Our teacher talked some shit about whole notes and half notes. Nothing more than I had learned in grade school. But Kat, with Kat I learned something more.
Music Theory was our last class of the day. So when class was over, I headed out the door to meet up with my ride home.
"Chris," she stopped me. "Are you doing anything right now?"
"Well, I was just gonna go home."
"Oh. 'Cuz I was thinking... would you want to hang out for a while? There's this park I used to go to in the middle of the woods. I like to watch the sun set behind the trees there."
"Oh, really."
"Would you like to go with me?"
"Well, yes. Sure. I would love to go with you."
So I followed Kat to her car, where she introduced me to Arachne -- her giant papier-mâché spider which hung from the dome light in her 1986 silver Mercury Topaz.
Kat drove me to J.B. Williams park in Glastonbury. After a short walk across a bridge that straddled a crystal-pure tiny little creek, we arrived at this old wooden jungle gym which sat amidst a tiny little clearing in the woods.
And that was it. The time was 5:30 PM on a duskening mid-October twilight. Neither of us said a word as we watched the sun descend behind orange and amber leaves as the sun trickled through the tiny openings in the forest's canopy.
We held each other for twenty minutes. Neither of us said a word. We sat there in each others arms, safe from the ridicule and misunderstandings of the outside world. There was Kat. There was me. In each others arms as the sun disappeared under the horizon, leaving two lost souls together in the dark.
