Tina Tehrani
Senior Editor
The following is taped on the wall in the corner of a hallway: “Please dispose of your trash [someone added “and spillage”]properly…” below in small print, it says, “…and yes, this means you!”
The hallway. A spot intersected between the world-language hallway and the library hallway. From this corner to locker 1099A, 1099B on the right, and 1140A, 1140B on the left is where the hallway kids migrate. There are two doors from the corner going towards the world-language hallway: Visual & Performing Arts-Room 130 and Room 110D. Seven lights to the library. 140 Lockers. Students tend to sit on the right side, facing the end of the world-language hallway.
Before 2009 this hangout spot used to be named “The Shire.” However, as those we might call the hobbits began to graduate, residents of this new place became labeled as “the hallway kids.” There are various groups of students who hang out in this spot. Merahm Hamdan and Courtney Stevenson, now freshmen in college, were students who spent most of their time in this hallway.
Courtney explained how the hallway originated. “I had taken to sitting by my locker during lunches in freshman year, so that I could take notes for history while eating lunch; the Lounge was too crowded and hectic, and I couldn’t have lunch in the library,” she said. “I liked being able to be really alone to do work and chill, even though people would be passing me all the time.
“After a while, my friends started finding me and sitting with me for lunch, and pretty soon it became the lunch spot for literary and dramatic types. I stopped being able to get any work done during lunch periods, but I think it was a good trade off. Usually people would sit along the lockers in a line, but just as often people would form a giant circular clump on one side of the hallway, making it very difficult for general traffic to get around us.”
Merahm was one of those friends who began to sit with Courtney during her sophomore year. “I’m not sure exactly how I made the transition to ‘hallway kid’,” she said. “But I remember spending one free period sitting out there with Courtney and just decided I liked it there.”
When Courtney and Merahm graduated last year, there became a new era of hallway kids. In preliminary interviews, I was told it would be easy for me to interview the hallway kids. However, some students I asked to interview either denied wanting to be interviewed or kept postponing interviews. Nevertheless, I did get the chance to interview senior Jordan Ho. He calls himself “the ring leader of them all.”
Jordan explained how the hallways are made up of mostly theatre kids and non-conformists. “I’m sure I sometimes see people who aren’t theatre kids,” he said. “Usually because I’m here other theatre kids migrate here. We’re all magnets and come together. This group is a very broad group of people than other kids groups. Most hallway kids are non-conformists. They just don’t like the noise of the lounge. Most theatre kids are non-conformists. Theatre kids are mostly non-conformists to society.”
Courtney sees the hallway kids as a diverse group of people, “both nerdy drama kids and dramatic nerds. General profile is someone who has a love/hate relationship with the Twilight series, can appreciate Pokémon, and who is not afraid to bust out random dance moves in the hallway.”
Mostly, the theater kids that I interviewed didn’t really think that there were others who actually sit in the hallway but themselves. Merahm elaborated on how the theater kids have become one big family from sitting in the hallway. “In the beginning, at least as I remember it, it was mainly just other theater kids who sat there,” she said. “I feel like even though we spent so much time together at rehearsal the hallway is sort of where we did more bonding, in a sense. On the one hand, we spent so much time together at rehearsal that the cast would just become really close, but it’s a different kind of bond.
“Your cast became your second family, but the theatre kids I sat with in the hallway were much closer to me. I think it’s probably because that’s where we got to talk about things other than whatever show was being done at the time. Also, there isn’t just one kind of theater kid. Some like being in the lounge where there’s more going on, and others like a quieter setting. That’s why I liked the hallway. I also think that the ones that ended up in the hallway for the most part had similar personality types. We were all sort of bookish, which is probably why there’s such a crossover between the library and the hallway. If we weren’t in the hallway, we were in the library, so eventually the people we were friends with from the library sat with us in the hallway. By my senior year though, that wasn’t necessarily the case. Our usual crowd always sat against lockers, but then other people started randomly sitting out there too. I never got to know them, though. I suspect they just wanted to be like us. I was flattered until I found them in my spot.”
All in all, junior Nick Zanca tells us about the individual in a culture. “I don’t care,” he said. “I’m not afraid not to conform. It’s like saying ‘who needs society to tell you what’s right?’ when you have a melting pot of individualism-no two people are the same. Everyone’s an individual, an individual for everybody.
“It’s not a question of why we create these subcultures. Why do you have to label yourself with one culture? You’re never going to learn what other people are like if you devote yourself to one section. It’s not what the true culture is it’s what the true diversity is, man. I’m not going to conform to society man. It’s the individual-what makes me-the melting pot.”
Clearly, we see that the hallway has its own expressive reasons for why students hang out there. The main theme as to why students sit here is simple: they are their own individual and they don’t want to be like everyone else.
Next Issue: Maintenance stairwell.
