A C H A P E L TA L K
by Alison M. Brown ’19 January 11, 2019
Stuck on the 405
W
hen Katy Perry describes a California girl in her hit song, “California Gurls,” I’m not sure I’m exactly what she had in mind. I don’t wear “Daisy Dukes” with bikinis on top, my skin is definitely not sun-kissed, and I need SPF 50 just to stay indoors. Though all signs point to me being a vampire who has successfully infiltrated Southern California, I think I am very much a California Girl, despite what Katy has to say. As some of you know, I went to a progressive school called Wildwood in Los Angeles, and it was pretty
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Groton School Quarterly
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Winter 2019
crunchy. I distinctly remember my eighth-grade science class, where instead of learning anything about physics, we read the science fiction novel Ready Player One for homework and played SimCity in class to learn about urban planning. It remains unclear in which direction Wildwood is progressing. Outside the classroom, I developed a love for acaí bowls and coffee, especially latte art, and I have traveled all around L.A. in search of the best foam artists in the city. I even once saw Guy Fieri driving a red convertible on the 405. That’s right, I’ve been in bumper-to-bumper traffic with the Mayor of Flavortown. If there’s one thing that unites people from California, it’s that we should secede from the union and become an independent nation with the fifth largest economy in the world. Sorry, I meant to say “traffic”— if there’s one thing that unites people from California, it’s traffic. Anyways, in middle school, I spent a lot of time in the car driving to soccer tournaments. I always looked forward to tournament weekends because my mom and I would wake up early when my brother was still asleep, get egg-and-cheese sandwiches and iced mochas from Starbucks, and then drive for three hours from Santa Monica to Rancho Cucamonga. On the way, we’d listen to podcasts in the car, usually about serial killers and psychopaths. It was great mother-daughter bonding time, albeit with a high body count. One day I got worried that this might be unhealthy, so I asked my mom, “Do you think I’m a psychopath?” “What? No, of course not. You don’t eat pork because you feel bad for the little piggies. Why would you think that?” “Well, some kid at school told me I was weird, and you never really know, do you?”