Regis High School yearbook
How will you spend your Thanksgiving break?
Although Sunday night's Grammys were graced by some truly grotesque commodities — among them, Quentin Tarantino trying to talk black (paging Spike Lee) and a necromantic 3-D tribute to Michael Jackson — the show has prompted me to write a more personal Pretentiousaurus. I figure it's time to tell the world my sordid history with Lady Gaga: the highs, the lows, the lies, the blow. Actually, the puberty.
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I went to Regis High School, an all-boys, full-scholarship Jesuit school on the Upper East Side. If you walk near 85th and Park, you can derive some idea of what I looked like as a freshman: back hunched under a million textbooks, baggy golf shirt, khakis, facial hair nonexistent. The school took pride in its academics and its debate team, which meant that inside you would find either charisma or a total lack thereof. I played in the band.
Because Regis put on plays but didn't want to gender-bend everything Shakespeare-style, the school used to essentially rent girls from the neighborhood Catholic schools for each production. When I was a freshman, the fall musical was "Guys and Dolls." I was in the band playing sax. Adelaide was played by Stefani Germanotta, a Convent of the Sacred Heart senior known today, in gay bars around the world, as Lady Gaga.
That's really the full extent of my story. Kind of lame, I know. Although I can claim — and have claimed in job interviews — that I once played backup for Lady Gaga, the band was separated from her by gaps in both space and, effectively, class. Because we were loud, large and out of tune, we played from the balcony above the audience, in the cheap seats.
But damn. Stefani. Anyone who was in that band at that moment can tell you about the effect she had on us from below, literally and figuratively speaking — the way she entranced us, distracted us, made "Take Back Your Mink" impossible to play. For minutes at a time, we abandoned the conceit that we were performing rather than watching. And she wasn't just appealing to a 14-year-old's desperation — she was a pitch-perfect Adelaide, fully embodying the high-pitched hysteria of Vivian Blaine in the film version. In our senior year, we were still talking about her. If I were a Masshole, I'd have poured a beer on the ground in her name.
Do I see the same girl in Lady Gaga's ubiquitous persona? Not at all. She's obscured; she's opaque. Layers upon layers of distortion guard her actual personality. It seems like the entire point of "Lady Gaga" — the name, to me, always sounding like stupefied baby talk — is guardedness in abstraction; the construction of a glitzy mask out of sparkle and myth. She's not like Taylor Swift. She's hardly a person.
Still, I remember how much of a sex symbol she was at 18, in a poofy blond wig, without even trying. I remember the effortlessness of her performance — of her state of being in performance. And I feel privileged to have been there in that balcony with the candy wrappers, the stern stares from Mr. Phillips and the pubescent feeling of awe. It's not often that you get to see the person behind the commodity — especially when she brands herself as performance art and may, indeed, have a penis.
