Punk Rock High School: How Embarrassing Could It Be?
High school is a notoriously terrible time in everyone's lives. So naturally, we had to find out just how terrible it could be. Simon Stephens' drama about hormonal 17-year-olds, Punk Rock, opens November 17 in an MCC Theater production directed by Trip Cullman at the Lucille Lortel Theatre. We quizzed the cast members about their most embarrassing moments. The results might shock you.
(© MCC Theater)
Pico Alexander
I was told that a girl liked me, at a party. It was a cast party for The Hot L Baltimore at LaGuardia. I went in to kiss her and she rejected me, and it was in front of a group of people watching me. It was just awful.
Lilly Englert
I moved to Italy when I was thirteen, which is high school/teenage age, and I moved to this village where there were like six people in my class and I didn’t speak a word of Italian. So I think that the whole first six months of my high school existence was people joking about me. I didn't speak the language, I didn't fit in at all, I had no friends, my whole experience interacting with boys was really awkward. There were so many things, it was all bad.
Annie Funke
Can I say middle school? I got teased a lot about my weight, and the bully of the school came up to me and started yelling out the Jenny Craig theme song number in front of everybody in the library. I think I was pretty much scarred for life after that.
David Greenspan
I have to tell you that high school was pretty darn good. That was when I got involved in theater. When you were in the drama department, you couldn't do anything wrong. You were suddenly in a different part of the school, and we were all crazy. Once I discovered that, I don't think anything embarrassing happened to me. You couldn't really embarrass yourself in the drama department.
Colby Minifie
I wore see-through pants in dance class and I didn't know. I was wearing those days-of-the-week underwear and that was not OK. I wore them for a good month before some really nice girl was like "by the way your pants are see-through, and they've been see-through for a month." I went through a phase of wearing really crazy outfits, and I wore caution tape, Caution: Don't touch my thighs. Why would anybody touch my thighs, anyway?
Will Pullen
There are so many embarrassing things that happened to me. Probably asking a girl to a dance, her saying no, and then finding out that all of her friends could hear everything, and they all kind of came out laughing. It was a double rejection.
Noah Robbins
We had powder-puff games, where the girls from every class compete in football, and we had a pep rally for it where I got suckered into dancing in front of the whole school as a representative of the freshman class. In retrospect it was one of my proudest moments, but I'm pretty sure I looked like an idiot.
Douglas Smith
I knocked myself in the showers freshman year of high school, totally naked. That was very embarrassing. I was on the wrestling team and it was after a tournament. I slipped in the shower, knocked myself out, and woke up totally nude on my back on a bench with the entire wrestling team around me, naked, looking down on me. I was thirteen, just gone through puberty, and I don't think I've ever gotten that out of my mind ever.
For tickets to Punk Rock, click here.
