If there's one thing I've learned in my many years here as a forever non-native, it's that when Minnesotans want to test a stranger's bona fides or attempt a shorthand socioeconomic profile of someone, they ask where you went to high school.
So it was entertaining to see that very question pop up in our comment section this week, in response to Dan Suitor's story "How to Win Votes and Influence Neighbors: City Politics as a Way Forward in Dire Times." I won't put the commenter on blast here (you can easily find the comment yourself), but let's just say it was as pure a strain of Minneapolis cred-challenging as you could ask.
So in this week's Open Thread, let me ask: Where did you go to high school? And what does this say about you?
Sadly, to answer this question, I must undermine the image you all have of me as a blue-collar common man, a veritable Springsteen lyric brought to life. I attended a place called The Hun School of Princeton, a New Jersey prep school where my classmates included Ethan Hawke, future Venezuelan opposition leader Leo Lopez, the not especially bright children of many successful dentists and lawyers, and, uh, the nephew of the guy who cowrote the songs for Fiddler on the Roof.
BUT! I was a scholarship boy. My family could in no way have afforded this otherwise, no matter how determined my mom was to send me to Hun, since after all if Larry Marcinkus's parents had gotten him in there, she could too. In both high school and college, I have benefitted from the willingness of institutions to accept dumb rich kids in order to almost wholly offset the cost of my attendance.
My brother, who is probably smarter than me (at least when it comes to left brain stuff), went to the local public school, where he was a math whiz and the closer for their baseball team. This inspired my calculus teacher—and my school's baseball coach, who was very generous with my final grade—to tell me that my parents had sent the wrong kid to Hun. He was joking. I think.
But enough about me! As always, feel free to ignore this prompt and talk about whatever you want. This is your Open Thread, after all.
