“Where’d you go to high school?”

by Mary Poletti

It’s as St. Louis as Budweiser, Stan Musial, pork steaks & adding an unnecessary R to the name of our first president. It’s the age-old question on which our entire social caste system is based. It unites the St. Louis diaspora across the country.

“Where’d you go to high school?”

SLU High

I spent a lot of time in Broken Arrow, Okla., in 2003. For the rest of college, whenever I met someone from the greater Tulsa area, which was rather frequently, I asked him/her: “Where’d you go to high school?” I was invariably met with a look of utter confusion. Ask the same question to the roughly 300 St. Louis kids at my small college in central Missouri, and they’d immediately & brightly respond.

And, of course, then you could judge them accordingly.

To my knowledge, no one knows where the high school question originated, how it became the number-one source for social judgment or why it is exclusive to St. Louis. A professor at SIUE announced in February she’d be doing a study on the question, positing that perhaps it made outsiders feel uncomfortable.

For better or for worse, that’s sort of what it’s designed to do, isn’t it? Find out just how St. Louis you are?

What other innocuous question so perfectly encapsulates your entire life history in socially judgeable form? If you went to public school, which high school tells us where you grew up & one of two cultural truths about you: Either you weren’t Catholic or ultra-Lutheran (otherwise you would have gone to Lutheran North/South/St. Charles), or your family didn’t have the money or inclination to send you to one of the area’s fine private schools. If you went to a private high school, you were probably Catholic; which high school reveals geography in a very general sense, but more to the point, it reveals your social standing. You would never automatically assume a girl who went to Cor Jesu came from wealth; you might assume that about a girl who went to St. Joe’s.

Now, mix in the reputation of your school, and you have your image ready-made!

Early in my junior year of college, a meme floated around my campus that asked how many kids from a given St. Louis high school it took to tap a keg. The answers proved illuminating, if humorously so, about high schools I’d never really even heard of, growing up in the Metro East. My tiny private high school in Belleville played sports against a motley assortment of private & Special School District high schools: Logos, Yeshiva, Life Christian, Thomas Jefferson, the North/South/West County Techs. Of those, only Logos had produced even one kid at my college (and she turned out to have been an old opponent of mine on the volleyball court). I knew nothing else of St. Louis’ high schools except the way the various private school alumni at my little college represented them to me, and so I carried those humorous descriptions with me for a long time.

When I was at Mizzou, I knew only a handful of St. Louis kids (most of the folks in my prestigious master’s program were from out of state). I casually asked every one of them where they’d gone to high school. One girl said Visitation. I decided on the spot that we could never be friends. Shameful? Probably. She might have been a really nice girl. (Although she was a VP Ball veteran who called her dad by his first name, so…) But that’s how St. Louisans roll. We pass judgment based on where you spent your adolescence.

Generalizations? That’s what it’s all about. They don’t account for the anomalies. A kid who went to Ladue might have grown up in a crappy apartment in Olivette. My boyfriend’s younger sisters commuted 40 minutes one way to go to Rosati-Kain. I had a suitemate in college who grew up in Benton Park, the daughter of Eritrean refugees, but went to Rockwood Summit. Busing still happens. There are such things as scholarships. High schools close; my boyfriend’s & my mother’s both did.

But these are anomalies, say the staunchest supporters of the high school caste system. The generalizations are still useful, they say. They’re a framework through which to understand people — without ever really taking the time to understand them, perhaps — & maintain the bubble in which we live.

By the way, did you know the woman who plays Phyllis on “The Office” is from St. Louis? Did you know she went to Cleveland? Now there’s some solid South City cred.

Mary Poletti is a marketing professional in the financial industry & a resident of the City’s St. Louis Hills neighborhood. She went to Governor French Academy, which you’ve probably never heard of. What now?

Classic rock

by Mary Poletti

St. Louisans like classic rock. But don’t take my word for it. Scroll through the FM dial around here sometime. We have four — count ’em, four — classic rock stations.

Spoiler alert: This guy has a lot to do with it.

There’s the grandaddy of them all, KSHE 95, with its iconic pig & its love of sweet electric guitar riffs, toeing a hard-rock line; a former coworker in Quincy who grew up in West County once referred to it as the official radio station of 55-year-old dudes who still have garage bands. There’s KHITS, with its broad format & well-known local voices like the smoky-toned Radio Rich. There’s Oldies 103.3, which plays pretty much everything from the ’60s into my lifetime. With all that saturation in the market, the debut of 100.3 The Brew a few months ago was the facepalm heard ’round the region, although it’s since become the soundtrack to many an afternoon in the garage and/or backyard BBQ in some southerly parts of the County. And we’re not even counting 106.5 The Arch, where it’s not unheard-of to hear Kelly Clarkson’s “What Doesn’t Kill You” & Led Zeppelin’s “Black Dog” back to back (I know, because I did on my way home from work today).

Seriously, who really needs four classic rock stations?

A million classic rock fans who will listen to all four of them, that’s who. St. Louis has shown plenty of loyalty to classic rock. Shows like Boston, Bon Jovi, Aerosmith — the mainstays of ye olde Riverport (and it’ll always be Riverport to many of us) usually sell the place out. To say nothing of the insane amount of money we’ll shell out to see the really good stuff at Scottrade. (The Dome, meh.)

St. Louisans reserve a special place in their hearts for a certain former Van Halen frontman, mostly because vice versa. Sammy Hagar loves him some Gateway City. He decided some 32 years ago, when he was greeted with a raucously devoted crowd while headlining a show at the old Busch Stadium, that he owned St. Louis & would always hold it dear. (Frankly, if my first experience of St. Louis were the old Busch circa 1980, I’d fall in love, too.) As much as we love our homegrown celebrities, we go completely ape-crap if someone not from St. Louis starts extolling the virtues of our fair city & adopts it as his own. Not solely because of his athletic achievements do we so deeply love Pennsylvania native Stan Musial, although I must make it clear here that there is no comparison between the Redbirds’ perfect knight & the Red Rocker.

If Hagar is emblematic of Van Halen & Van Halen is emblematic, in so many ways, of the brand of classic rock most likely to be heard on St. Louis airwaves, no wonder we love classic rock around here.

We have our philosophical reasons, too. St. Louisans like classic rock because it’s down in there with the people, just like them. We’re an unpretentious bunch, and classic rock is an unpretentious genre, even if a lot of its surviving stars are still eerily reminiscent of the guys from “This Is Spinal Tap.” It’s music for grilling in your backyard, cruising in your car, working on your car, enjoying the weekend. It lends itself really well to cracking open an ice-cold beer. St. Louisans live for that kind of thing.

Too, St. Louisans like classic rock because it is, by definition, nostalgic. It encapsulates better, simpler days for many of us. A lot of outsiders, and a lot of locals as well, argue that St. Louis has seen better days. Around here, we like to remember the past fondly. Classic rock is the soundtrack to such memories.

Perhaps as much as anything else, classic rock has endured. And so has St. Louis. That’s as good a reason as any for St. Louisans to like classic rock.

Mary Poletti is a marketing professional in the financial industry & a resident of the City’s St. Louis Hills neighborhood. She grew up listening to Steely Dan cassettes in her dad’s Escort, so she’s not really in a position to judge.

Settling down in St. Louis

by Mary Poletti

St. Louisans like defending St. Louis. We are a fiercely loyal crowd. If you insult our city, it’s  not outside the realm of possibility that one of us will make your mouth look like Jaroslav Halak‘s after a particularly rough game against Chicago.

And what better way to defend St. Louis than with our lives?

The eastward view from Market & Tucker.

St. Louisans like settling down in St. Louis. Many of us never leave. We may spend our entire lives in one neighborhood or even on one street, or we may come up as city-dwellers & escape to the suburbs for any number of reasons, or we may pass our formative years in the suburbs & eventually become part of the optimistic migration back to the ICSL. For whatever reason, many of us never get too terribly far from the Arch. Perhaps it’s family ties. Perhaps it’s inertia. Or perhaps it’s loyalty.

Loyalty would seem to explain the siren call St. Louis puts out for its children to come home. So many people leave St. Louis, looking for something — work, education, glamour — and so many of those people find their way back. Perhaps it’s just their default setting. Or perhaps it’s loyalty.

For me, it was loyalty.

When this blog got its false start two and a half years ago, I was living in Columbia, Mo., earning my master’s degree. I soon found myself in Quincy, Ill., with the dream job my master’s degree helped me earn. I was never too far from St. Louis, but I never stopped dreaming I’d come home. It was simply where I belonged.

On June 11 of this year, I became a St. Louisan again, after spending eight of the last 10 years away from the city I had never stopped loving. It was a dream come true. It was a realization that the dream was about so much more than the dream job. It was my loyalty to the Gateway City, finally rendered in flesh & not just in emotion.

In the last two months, I’ve remembered so much of the stuff St. Louisans like, and so much stuff I like(d) about being a St. Louisan. And I think, finally, I’m ready to put it into words again.

Mary Poletti is a marketing professional in the financial industry & a resident of the City’s St. Louis Hills neighborhood. She is slowly re-learning how not to suck at blogging.

St. Patrick’s Day

by Mary Poletti

2008 St. Patrick's Day Parade in downtown St. Louis.

Among the many things St. Louisans like are their heritage, parades, and drinking. Anything that combines these three is particularly special to us. So naturally, St. Patrick’s Day is a banner day in the Gateway City.

Many outsiders don’t realize that, at last count, 8.6 percent of St. Louis residents were descended from Irish heritage, though it certainly makes sense in light of St. Louis’ very strong Catholic tradition. So intertwined are Irish and Catholics that the famous regulation against eating meat on Fridays during Lent is lifted whenever St. Patrick’s Day falls on a Friday. There was much gnashing of teeth when the celebration of St. Patrick’s Day fell during the penitent period of Holy Week, the run-up to Easter, two years ago. But anyway… Unofficially speaking, the highest concentration of Irish St. Louisans is in Dogtown, the informally designated City neighborhood that lies immediately south of Forest Park (comprising parts of Clayton/Tamm, Franz Park, and Ellendale). The Irish Catholic lay organization Ancient Order of Hibernians (think Knights of Columbus, but just for Irish guys) has a chapter based in Dogtown parish St. James the Greater, and Irish flags and shamrocks decorate this area year-round. You can imagine how nuts these folks go for St. Patrick’s Day — and it’s infectious.

2008 St. Patrick's Day parade in downtown St. Louis.

For St. Louisans, nothing quite captures the mood and spirit of a significant holiday like a bunch of people marching down the street in outlandish costumes, performing choreographed dances, playing various instruments, and throwing candy and beads at other people lining the street with alcoholic beverages. Yes, the parade is a beloved tradition on many St. Louis holidays. Many St. Louisans love parades enough to put on at least two for a given holiday, and St. Patrick’s Day is one of those holidays special enough to occasion two parades. The St. Louis parade, organized by the Metropolitan St. Patrick’s Day Parade Committee, is typically held downtown on the Saturday before St. Patrick’s Day and includes a 5K run. The main event in many partiers’ eyes, however, is not this affair often ranked among the country’s top St. Patrick’s Day parades, but rather the Hibernians-sponsored parade down Tamm Avenue in Dogtown on St. Patrick’s Day proper and the Irish Festival that follows it. Anything else is child’s play. Take off work for a parade? Sure…

2008 St. Patrick's Day Parade in downtown St. Louis.

More than an excuse to have a parade, St. Louisans love an excuse to drink. Our fair city recently made lists of the drunkest and craziest towns in America — and was offended not to be ranked higher on the drunk list. We were once the beer-brewing capital of America, and one of the biggest beer companies in the world still brews here. Drinking is not only a part of St. Louis’s heritage, it’s in our blood (and indeed, sometimes booze constitutes a higher-than-desirable percentage of our blood). So any holiday whose celebration traditionally centers on drinking is going to be a beloved one for us. Not that we typically NEED an excuse to drink, mind you, but on St. Patrick’s Day we’re permitted and even encouraged to do so. Recognizing the shitshow that a heavily Irish neighborhood like Dogtown is bound to become on St. Patrick’s Day, the Hibernians don’t place excessive restrictions on their parade and festival attendees: No glass containers, try to keep your coolers out of one another’s way, don’t drink and drive, and keep it family-friendly. These regulations meet with varied success, but a good time is had by all, to be sure.

St. Louisans love St. Patrick’s Day because it affords them an opportunity to embrace their heritage — not just their ethnic heritage, but their longstanding tradition of being able to throw one heck of a party. Sure, Boston is known for its gigantic Irish population and its Celtic-flavored punk bands, but it’s hard to justify traveling that far for one day. And sure, the rivers run green in Chicago, but who cares about those uppity Cubbies fans anyway…

Mary Poletti is a journalist and graduate student in Columbia, Mo., a native of Belleville, Ill., and a former resident of Maplewood and the City’s North Hampton neighborhood. She doesn’t have a drop of Irish blood, but she’ll see you in Dogtown tomorrow.

“Up in the Air”

by Mary Poletti

Remember how we said St. Louisans especially like shout-outs to St. Louis from homegrown celebrities? Well, St. Louisans will take them pretty much anywhere we can get them. And that’s why St. Louisans like — no, LOVE — the Oscar-nominated 2009 film Up in the Air, great swaths of which were filmed in our fair hometown. The St. Louis media was all over this film like a cheap suit before filming even started. Sure, other great movies had been filmed in St. Louis — Planes, Trains and Automobiles featured some scenes at Lambert Field, and hello, Meet Me in St. Louis? — but had any of them starred GEORGE FREAKIN’ CLOONEY? And had any of them cast legions of St. Louisans as extras? And had any of them treated St. Louis as their own personal soundstage without actually mostly taking place in St. Louis? Not in this generation, bubba.

Hey, that's OUR airport! And...and that's George Clooney! (Paramount Pictures via TheInsider.com)

So we rubbernecked in our own streets during filming, hoping to catch a glimpse of Clooney, and we waited with bated breath for Jason Reitman’s inadvertent love letter to our fair city to drop. And when it did, we hurried into theaters, oohing and aahing over the gratuitous shots of St. Louis — the ones we had anticipated like Lambert (which gets a serious shout-out in the film) and the Cheshire Inn, but also the unexpected ones like Mansion House Apartments, the Renaissance, Affton High School, Lafayette Square, a little Methodist church in Maplewood…the list goes on. (In fact, the Post-Dispatch visualized the whole list.)

And when Up in the Air succeeded, critically and financially, and began to generate Oscar and Golden Globes buzz, we were euphoric — and disappointed when it failed to follow through on most of the buzz. Much of the day-after coverage of the Golden Globes and now the Oscars in the St. Louis media has led with something to the effect of “Avatar and The Hurt Locker score big; Up in the Air does not.” We were INVESTED this year, man. Compared to the rest of the field, Up in the Air never really had a shot at the Oscars. Not when Best Picture was the duel of the director-exes between Avatar and The Hurt Locker; not when Jeff Bridges and Mo’Nique had Best Actor and Best Supporting Actress sewn up (Clooney said he’d even voted for Bridges himself); not when Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire was pretty much guaranteed Best Adapted Screenplay, perhaps as a consolation prize for losing out on Best Picture and Best Actress. But in St. Louisans’ minds, Up in the Air just had to score big. It just had to. It already had with us.

For in our hearts and minds, St. Louis is the real winner with Up in the Air‘s Oscar buzz. We get to feel a little better about the city we love, which obviously many others have now seen and loved too, even if it’s disguised as a host of other cities. A friend who was gunning for Avatar for Best Picture scoffed earlier that Precious was poverty porn; when Up in the Air came up in the same conversation, I responded that it qualified as St. Louis porn. And we wouldn’t want it any other way. Congratulations on your achievement, Reitman and Clooney and friends, and thanks for bringing us along for the ride.

Mary Poletti is a journalist and graduate student in Columbia, Mo., a native of Belleville, Ill., and a former resident of Maplewood and the City’s North Hampton neighborhood. She lived a block away from that little Methodist church in Maplewood, and her sister lives within walking distance of the Cheshire Inn. Neither one ever saw George Clooney.

Celebrities from St. Louis

by Mary Poletti

Perhaps nothing validates the existence of St. Louis as much as the famous people who hail from the area. You’d be hard pressed to find another town larger than, oh, I don’t know, Jefferson City that so values its famous native sons and daughters, no matter how trivial their fame or tangential their connection to the Gateway City.

St. Louis Walk of Fame (magazinUSA.com)

No one will deny the cultural contributions of some of St. Louis’ most famous products: Tennessee Williams, Joseph Pulitzer, Chuck Berry, Miles Davis, and more. In the lower tiers of celebrity, though, we are all too quick to claim and honor our own. When I was a kid, a high-profile billboard on Highway 40, the one in front of the old Pumping Station G gasometer on Newstead, advertised the classic sitcom Roseanne with a grinning picture of John Goodman and the words “The Big Man from LA (Lower Affton).” Still more recently, there’s The Office‘s Pam Beesly, Nerinx Hall and Truman State grad Jenna Fischer, the female lead on a show beloved or possibly lamented by millions for popularizing ubiquities like “That’s what she said” (my trivia team would have no collective identity if it weren’t for that one). Don’t think for a minute that there’s a St. Louis rock fan who doesn’t still, on some level, mourn the breakup of The Urge (why else do you think so many people still go to former frontman Steve Ewing’s shows?) or tune into Christian music just to hear Jars of Clay, who got their start down the road at Greenville College. And not even Wild Wild West could diminish St. Louis’ love for Kevin Kline. Much.

We’re especially inclined to love people who show their love for St. Louis. A little later in my life, there was, of course, Nelly, and my first view of him, an iconic split-second shot from below of him rapping with the unmistakable silver curve of the Arch splitting the blue sky above his head. St. Louis’ love for Nelly and other Gateway City rappers like Chingy and Murphy Lee, I’d argue, is based on their willingness to shout his pride for St. Louis from the rooftops, the same way 2Pac did for southern California or Jay-Z does for New York. Look, guys! We can be a big-shot hip-hop city, too! There’s also good old Uncle Tupelo, precursor to Wilco, who have a common denominator in Belleville, Ill., native Jeff Tweedy; Wilco’s repertoire includes tunes like “Casino Queen,” Laclede’s Landing tribute “Heavy Metal Drummer,” and my personal favorite, the Belleville lament “Sky Blue Sky.” The highly prized St. Louis shout-outs aren’t limited to music, either. Kitschy art mainstay Mary Engelbreit, the visual art equivalent of a Vera Bradley bag, is loved nowhere as much as she is in her native St. Louis (my high school volleyball coach once pointed out her house on the bus ride to an away match in Ladue) because she creates so much art about St. Louis and for causes like the St. Louis Public Library. Spielberg spouse Kate Capshaw, in her one notable movie role as Indiana Jones’ female foil in Temple of Doom, gives a shout-out to Missouri at the end of the movie. And in a remarkable wink to her hometown, Karen Allen, who pretty much hasn’t aged since Raiders of the Lost Ark, played the female lead in a 1987 film adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, which is set in St. Louis. Well, actually, even though my dad swears she’s from Webster Groves, Karen Allen is from Carrollton, Ill., which is a solid 50 miles north of St. Louis, but whatever — it’s close enough for most St. Louisans to claim her.

St. Louis’ love of sports merges perfectly with the city’s love of its own to enshrine its native athletes as minor gods. I’m looking at you, various mid-20th-century Cardinals and Browns. You, too, Mizzou football standout and Philadelphia Eagles rookie Jeremy Maclin. The first glimpse of a Maclin Eagles jersey in Missouri set many hearts aflutter: Make us proud, our dear Kirkwoodian!

Oh, and God forbid a St. Louisan should show up on a reality TV show. The first Bachelorette was the jilted Trista, whom my Chesterfield-reared college roommate swears her sister knew in high school. And if Kansas City is still gripped by David Cook fever two years after his win (I’m not kidding — the Examiner, the community paper of record in the eastern suburbs of Kansas City, still had a David Cook section on its Web site when I profiled the paper for a media management class last semester), can you imagine what St. Louis would have done if Cardinals great Ozzie Smith’s son, Nikko Smith, had won American Idol?

It’s not just about the Walk of Fame in U City. It’s not just about cheering for a St. Louis shout-out in pop culture. It’s about knowing that people who grew up in the same place we did, who at one time called home the same place we called home, got out there and made some kind of cultural contribution. Um, such as it may have been.

Mary Poletti is a journalist and graduate student in Columbia, Mo., a native of Belleville, Ill., and a former resident of Maplewood and the City’s North Hampton neighborhood. She wishes St. Louis would have shown a little more loyalty to Stir.