An Education in How to Feel: My Years in LaGuardia’s Drama Locker Room by Maddie Schumacher

***All names and identifying details have been changed to protect privacy ***

Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of the Performing Arts. Maybe best known to my mothers generation as “the Fame school”. Maybe best known to my generation as the arts high school Timothee Chalamet attended. Either way, I roamed through the perfectly haunted halls too. 

There are many stories I can tell you about the infamous school: the Ansel Elgort talk back, the gender-neutral bathroom foreplay, the dance majors dancing on cafeteria tables, or the sit-in to overthrow our history-erasing principal (I refer to this specific event as Sound of Music-gate.) 

But in being fully transparent, every memory I have of high school exists in one space: the girls drama locker room. 

Imperfect in its stature, it reeked of vaginal discharge and Victoria Secret body mist. 

The girls drama locker room was located in the basement (where the rest of the drama department was located). Smushed between G25 and G23, G21 was a locker room with floor to ceiling mirrors and locker banks decorated with ribbon and pearls. Every drama major was meant to change into their acting clothes in the locker room. You were not meant to live there. Yet, we all did. 

The locker room was a sort of hub for the make believe. A place where we’d get a reset from the circus outside of it. A place where time stood still. I never knew if it was day or night there. I only knew I couldn't get myself to walk out. 

We (the drama girls (the bad ones)) would start our mornings attending our drama classes and then come lunch, we would sit in a circle in the second locker bank and skip our classes (math, science, you name it) until the final bell rang at 4:10.

It is an easy assertion to say “we skipped our academic classes because we only cared about acting.”  But I don't think that's strictly true and frankly, I think that's a simplification. I think we spent so much time in the locker room because no one taught us the separation of church and state. If you were performing Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire, odds are you were too emotionally drained to then go upstairs and take a math test

And maybe if you never attended drama school before, this may all sound a bit dramatic. You have to understand the complications of a Performing Arts school for this to all make sense. While my time at LaGuardia was dreamlike, it also was a bit of a brainfuck. You were expected to be the best (and stay humble) while doing your math homework (and simultaneously letting it all out on a hum.) Acting school requires a sensitivity from its students that I (and many others) couldn't fully turn off.  I think this is how we all found “the trauma dump.” 

Let me explain..

The pain-heirchay was the most fashionable choice as a drama major. While it may have not been as overt at the time, we were encouraged as drama majors to take “our broken hearts and turn them into art.” To be clear, no one ever said these words. Rather, it's how our food chain worked. If Clueless taught its audiences being blonde and hot made you popular then LaGuardia taught me, being vulnerable made you a great candidate for being a real actor. 

And we all wanted to be real actors desperately. 

I can clearly remember our first assignment in drama class freshman year: personal object. You were meant to bring in a personal object that meant something to you and act out a sorta improvisation based on it. Quickly, It became clear to me that crying on stage was encouraged. One by one, classmates went up and shared memories of pain, grief, or guilt. I remember kicking myself at sharing a happy memory within my camp stationary set. I felt like the only one who misunderstood the assignment. I had no idea we were comparing scars. 

Let me be clear: I think this is the gift of an arts education. Acting school reminds you to be a human long before being an actor. I believe it was through this exploration of identity (constantly) that bonded us drama majors so closely. Your day to day curriculum in drama class simulated a type of sleepover. 

But I also think this constant vulnerability is what made us so overwhelmed, so open (too open?) I remember a marvel of a drama teacher (they were our gods) sharing “you open a little door to your heart when you are acting.. But remember to close the door when you are done.” I never knew how to close that door. 

Vulnerability was how we connected.. Yet can you call it vulnerability if you know you're being vulnerable? Wouldn't you call that performance? 

So we performed our pain too.

I remember watching scenes on scene share day and trying to put all the pieces together. For example, if a drama student “aced” a dramatic monologue about grief.. I wondered who really died? I wondered how I could possess the same emotional sensitivity? I remember feeling jealous of performances like this.. Jealous of someone's pain. 

In retrospect now, I realize why we (the student body) were anxiety ridden. I understand why so many of us turned to the juul. 

We were unwell.

*

If the classrooms encouraged us to perform our pain, the locker room let us hold it.

In late April of my sophomore year, I was sitting alone in the locker room skipping my last class of the day (I am sure I had some excuse: perhaps a headache, an emotionally open monologue to memorize, or perhaps a disinterest in mathematics?)  

Suddenly, Laura ran in, crying. Laura was a friendly acquaintance of mine. I knew her as the drama department was small and deeply intimate (as you know by now.) I don't know that I would have called us friends. We were at similar parties and shared the same Pink Whitney bottle. 

She ran past me into the corner and sobbed. I didn't have time to think it through. Soon my body was pulling me next to her, rubbing her back and wiping her tears. Laura explained to me her boyfriend and her had broken up, only minutes ago. And so I helped. I spent the rest of the period cooling her down. 

This is something of a consistent feature with the locker room: it constantly mended broken hearts.. 

But I couldn't mend Laura's broken heart without months of prior research..

The upperclassmen girls acted as our teachers of girlhood. Often these girls would apply lipstick in the mirror standing only in their bras. I remember not being able to look away at the army of bodies in front of me. I remember the pain of wishing my body looked as chiseled. But the bodies in the locker room were the least interesting facade of each of those girls. It was their intellect and their confessions that made them more enticing than the purple balconette bras they had on. 

Femininity was expressed in the locker room through trading secrets and tampons. It was also shared through words of wisdom. I would have believed just about anything an older girl told me inside. I believe it was senior Amanda W who informed me on Donald Trump’s political agenda and how to make your breasts look bigger. It was those two confessions that were constantly in opposition for me. Because the girls who taught me what men did to women also taught me how to please those same men. 

We were constantly questioning in the locker room. I don't know what boys do in their locker rooms but I have a suspicion ours was more romantic. Or maybe ours was just more prolific.

These seniors showed up for each other and helped remind the younger girls of the beauty of female friendship. I wanted to be just like them. I look back on these moments as the moments I decided I wanted to be something more than an actor. I wanted to be a friend just like them. Somehow being a “talented actor” just didn't measure up in comparison. 

 I had seen plenty of seniors wipe their friends' tears standing in the same spot as Laura and me. 

Laura continued to sob as she said “this hurts so much.” And I knew how much it hurt because I too was sixteen defining my worth by whichever boy looked in my direction. But it was senior Amanda W who found me in the locker room (much like I had found Laura) and reminded me to turn to the movies. Amanda said “in order to get over a loss, you have to feel the pain.” Amanda recommended I go home and watch Call Me By Your Name. As I laid in bed that night, sad, watching the ending of the film, I heard maybe the central line. Elio’s dad sits with him after Oliver goes home and reminds Elio “if there is pain, nurse it” I remember immediately sobbing. I hadn't been reminded to feel. And then of course the same great scene ends even greater, Elio’s dad concludes his advice with “but to feel nothing so as not to feel anything - what a waste.” It was one of those perfect movie moments where for just a split second, everything I was going through made sense to me. 

Amanda had held me as I too cried in the locker room and told me to get it all out and then continue on. She didn't say use this pain in a scene (which was my impulse naturally.) She said feel it all and then choose to begin again… Amanda was wise. She was two years older than me but light years ahead. 

Sitting there with Laura, I couldn't offer her a cure. But I could offer her exactly what Amanda had offered me: a reminder to feel and then a reminder to go on. And if nothing else, a good movie recommendation too. 

Maybe I helped Laura that day to imitate what was constantly being shown to me. But, imitation is a powerful tool. And through it, I think I became something of a woman. 

Laura is now my family. We share walls today. We graduated from NYU this year and gave NYU no credit. 

*

Almost every woman I love today I met at LaGuardia. I look at these women's faces all the time and can track back the very moment where I found them.. Sitting in the locker room, open hearted and star-eyed...women longing for the future..

I only wish I could go back now and whisper to those girls “this is the whole point.” But I also think we somehow knew. I think we knew the whole damn time.