Burn Westford Boy, Burn! X2 Opens Nationwide, Giving my High-School Hometown, at Long Last, a Hero I first really noticed Aaron Stanford, who plays Pyro in the new X-Men flick opening today, back in 1995. I was at the Roudenbush Community Center in my adopted hometown of Westford, MA to see my acting coach's production of Equus. The production was something of a seminal moment for me. I had always considered the theatre world to be the kind of place that overweight girls with vocal talent went to have chandeliers dropped on their heads. That night, however, I saw Aaron playing opposite my German teacher, Herr Joyce, manically repeating over and over again the name of his character's self-created god, a giant virile equine creature represented by actors wearing open-faced steel horse masks. The play, by Peter Schaffer, opened up new doors to me as to what Performance (capital intended) could be. Here was a theatre that engaged the mind in a way that made your heart beat faster. It was the beginning of a journey for me.\ Truth be told, I never knew Aaron all that well. I talked to him a few times throughout high school, but that was it. He has since gone on to obviously big things, including the lead role in Tadpole, which is sort of an Igby Goes Down lite. However, this is not a "look how I'm vaguely associated to a celebrity-to-be" blog. Instead, I'm going to talk about Westford and why, for some reason, it has created a group of people very different from most towns. Westford was, until recently, a small farming town just past Concord, MA. It's biggest claim to fame is that Paul Revere forged the school bell and his son went to Westford Academy, which nowadays, is a public school. Like many New England towns, one of the houses on the green has a "Washington slept here" plaque and just down the road a small granite block with a raven cut into it lets people know that Edgar Allen Poe has slept in town as well. Like any town much like the one's surrounding it, it has developed over time it's own myths and legends. The Scottish Knight is a poorly carved pictograph that either proves that the Europeans were in America centuries before Columbus or a clever 19th century schoolboy prank. National Geographic has apparently been planning a documentary on it for the past thirty years or so. Part of the town used to be a summer cottage village for wealthy Bostonians, but has since become a year-round community. Known with typical Yankee frugality as "Nab", this area is considered "the bad side of the tracks" by the kids who live there and many of them aimed for a ghetto aesthetic in high school. It was a typical joke for neighboring Chelmsford kids to make that they would go down to Nab to see the drive-by apple shootings. The town has successfully fought off Wal-Mart, but succumbed to Applebee's and Chili's. The school mascot is the Grey Ghost. When it was co-opted by the LGB alliance, people started calling it the Gay Ghost. All in all, typical New England quirkiness ala Stephen King. I can't speak for everyone, but my experience living there was all in all, a strange one. First off, the kids were loaded with talent. I didn't realize it at the time, simply assuming the whole world was like Westford, but pound for pound, Westford students were frighteningly creative and this was not a town that even vaguely encouraged creativity. There was literally nothing to do and while this breaded in us a deep apathy towards everything, including ourselves, few schools had students with such an optimistically cynical world view. Westford kids, on the whole, disdained any kind of "look-at-me!" success or achievement. You can see this attitude in Aaron's website, which he shares with his brother and which, even now, includes his acting resume. You can see it in WBCN DJ and Westford alum Andy Hick's blog, which has comments like "Well, it's happened again - Easter's fallen on the same day as Hitler's Birthday, the anniversary of Columbine, Waco, and the Oklahoma City bombing. It's almost enough to put you off your chocolate bunny." Hell, even our class valedictorian had her cherry popped at Rocky Horror. I used to really hate Westford. It was dull, dull, dull. The thing is, all that dullness seems to have made many of us, wildly open to creating our own fun. In high school, I remember some bored after-school drama club kids deciding to become velociraptor's (okay, fine, I was one). After naming each other "Bob" or "Gertrude" (because "Xorax the Terrible" is a stupid name for a velociraptor), we went around the cafe (pronounced kaf) "mauling" people, which involved effeminately brushing someone with our hand while bouncing up and down. When our Dean came in, we mauled her as well. She asked us what we were doing and of course we told her that we were velociraptor's and we were mauling her. She looked at us warily and then backed away. Pure Westford. Boredom breeds ironic velociraptors. Since I've left, the boring cinderblock school has been renovated into Bayside High, the town has started a cultural center and property values have tripled. They even have a hometown celebrity to rally around. I imagine the kids at good ole' W.A. have a lot more to do now, but I can't help wondering if velociraptor's still roam the halls.

posted by Japhy at 5/01/2003 10:33:00 PM || #