841: My Senior Year
This episode appears to contain dynamically inserted ads. Transcript timestamps may be approximate.
From WB Easy Chicago, it's this American life. I'm Hana Jafiwalt sitting in for Ira Glass. It's the first day of high school, Salt Lake City. A bunch of students are standing around outside in clusters and the seniors are wearing little kid backpacks, ninja turtles, hello kitty spider-man, big 17 18-year-old kids in Winnie the Pooh backpacks. My colleague Miki Meek talked to seniors Astraya and Angie. So you guys what is the deal with like what's up with the backpacks? Why is this a senior thing? Because like we answer school kindergarten like with kids backpacks you know because we're little kids and then we're like leaving school with these on as well. You guys have any specific plans you've already made for this year that like you want to do together because it is your senior year. Actually on Thursday or tomorrow we're gonna go to interclasses so it could be like together more and like we should have the same lunches and stuff. You guys are having how many classes together? Zero. We have none. So which we're playing for trying to get to the same class. We're gonna be a bigger counselor. We're gonna be like we have separation anxiety like we have to be together. I'm really like Mark because it's his name Mark. I'm like Mark please let us be together like we want to enjoy our singing year you know. It's our last year together because we're both going different ways. They are really feeling the last timeness of this year ahead of them. The last year in these classes in these halls in backpacks the last year of these friendships in this place with these people. After this their lives will be different. All the seniors we talked to had a list of things you have to do senior year. Stuff they'd seen other kids do before them and also all the iconic experiences they'd seen in a million movies and TV shows. This school in fact is actually this school from high school musical that was filmed here. Anyway they all have lists that include the classics from football games, homecoming, senior sunrise, senior sunset, senior parties, senior memory boxes. That's a thing that was new to me along with. There's this thing called trash bagging. It's like when it's raining you put on a trash bag and slide down hills. So like do you step into the trash bag? Yeah like make holes for your legs and arms probably like over you on a swimsuit kind of. I've never done it. So she has to. Looming over each rate of passage no matter how stupid is the fear that if you don't go for it you could miss something really special something fleeting. You have one chance at senior year. You have to grab it. You have to go big. Ferris Bueller's Day Off is my number one inspiration. This is Vasey. I want to be him. I don't know if I'm well known enough to become East High's Ferris Bueller but that's my goal is to take an extraordinary crazy day off that will be talked about for generations. She's still working on a plan for that but in the meantime Vasey's got many other plans. Vasey says she spent most of high school going back home to her whole to study not this year. So once you got an invite to a pink party for senior girls something Vasey never would have gotten to before she went for it. I wore like a pink baby doll dress. I have me high go-go boots that I wore and I stole my mom's pearls to wear because it was kind of a formal event and it's a tradition that the girls all jump in the pool so me and my friends jumped in the pool. I was talking with my friends the other day and we said that it's kind of fun to you know we complain about it a lot but it's kind of fun to just be a girl going to an American public high school because you get that kind of like Americana high school thing you know. Being a senior is this like hyped up event so it's kind of like I get to do all of the cheesy things that they do in the coming of age movies that make me feel like I really am you know just an
Transcription truncated.