Just Danced

EPISODE 158: How a young Lady Gaga dominated my high-school cafeteria.

This is an episode about that person we all grew up with or went to school with or just kinda randomly encountered when we were younger, in real life, who then went onto become something that made you want to claim them. And exaggerate how you knew, all along, that they were gonna be a star.

It is also an episode about a pretty batshit core memory I’ve had lodged in my brain… and this is not an exaggeration… for more than 20 years. Ever since Pat Wolf and I were classmates at Regis, our all-boys high school in New York City.

I haven’t seen Pat more than a couple times over the last couple decades, typically at Regis reunions. But we here at PTFO started this week with an episode about pop stardom, and the journalism of Netflix’s unreleased Prince documentary, and so I figured I should fact-check my own hazy recollections here.

About someone who’d go on to perform at the Opening Ceremony of this year’s Olympics. And wear a dress made of raw meat to the MTV Video Music Awards in 2010. And win 13 Grammys and an Oscar, for A Star Is Born, appropriately enough. And also star in this weird Joker sequel that just came out last week.

But my memory of Lady Gaga began, of course, at Regis High School: the aforementioned all-scholarship Catholic institution on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Which was a lot like Gossip Girl. If most of the students in Gossip Girl commuted to the city and also never had sex…

As one look through our Class of 2003 yearbook would suggest.

DKN/YOUTUBE SPOILER ALERT:

Famously,

Pablo