A "FAME" REUNION (REMEMBER THEIR NAMES)

"Fame" Any artsy kid who saw the musical "Fame" at a tender age surely longed to attend a similar school, where leotard-clad students teemed the cafeteria and burst into song at the drop of a tray. The award-winning 1980 film, directed by Alan Parker, followed an array of precocious students as they sang and danced their way through the New York High School of Performing Arts. "Fame" chronicled a time when the city was a very hard place to be, and a mix of talent and hard work dangled a promise of salvation. It inspired a long-running television show and a stage musical, and now there's buzz over a remake, scheduled to hit cinemas in September.

So naturally I jumped at the chance to crash the 20-year reunion of 1989 graduates from Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School, the school in midtown Manhattan upon which "Fame" was based. (LaGuardia was created in 1984 after Performing Arts and the High School of Music and Arts merged.) I showed up at the school’s fifth-floor cafeteria last Saturday, and tagged along as the class of 1989 hit the buffet and then gathered around tables to reminisce. While some classmates have continued in the arts—notably Yunjin Kim, who plays Sun-Hwa Kwon on the show "Lost"—for most alumni life has moved on. Their ties to the school, however, remain strong.

“The only reason I came here was because of the movie,” says Georgiana Vidal, gesturing with ring-bedecked hands. “I thought, I want to go to that school—they sing all the time! And we kind of did sing all the time.” A vocal major at LaGuardia, Vidal now teaches math and science at PS 327 in Brooklyn. “It was happy land,” she sighs, pulling out a stack of colour photographs documenting a Halloween parade in the gym.

“We didn’t have homecoming, we had Halloween,” explains Leigh Woods, an art major who once celebrated the holiday dressed as the Empire State Building. Woods and her friend Rachel Vine then recall some of the odd fashions of the day, such as pegging jeans or rolling them up and stuffing them into oversized socks. Vine remembers an even more bizarre fad of students drinking juice from baby bottles.

Class

Returning students offer up stories of odd rivalries with other New York high schools. “Sometimes we’d open the door and a wall of snowballs would just hit," laughs David L. Romeo, an art major and now digital artist. "All the arty kids would get pummelled by the kids next door.” La Guardia was right next to the Martin Luther King High School.

“I was on the swim team,” says Woods, who now works as a television visual editor. “We’d go to Stuyvesant where they took it so seriously—we were like ‘Oh here we go, we’re gonna get blown out of the water.”

The 1989 class president was Zoe Schneider, a vivacious, corkscrew-curled vocal major (now a kids fashion designer). “I made everyone burst into 'Sing the Body Electric', which was very, very cool,” she says, recalling the day of graduation (Erica Jong was the commencement speaker). This is the same anthem the "Fame" kids belt out at their own graduation. “The school was an incredible outlet,” she says, wistfully.

~ HAVEN THOMPSON

Picture credit: Leigh Woods