eing very non-judgmental. As an arts school, it almost goes unsaid that we are different. And we like it that way. We’ve created an environment blind to oddly colored hair, flamboyancy, and the need many theatre students seem to have to spontaneously burst into their own rendition of Spring Awakening or Cabaret.

What a large portion of our school’s population fails to realize is that being the “abnormal” high school does not rid us of our own prejudice.

Announcing an interest in varsity cheerleading or the Carolina Panthers at our school might be the equivalent of “coming out of the closet” at another school. While the emotional conflict involved isn’t quite comparable, Northwest students often consider the average student at a “regular” high school to be an uncultured Neanderthal.

While the jock/cheerleader stereotype that we “art freaks” observe only through movies and television was probably drawn from real characters, we’ve magnified this idea to the point of considering ourselves superior to the artistically challenged while forgetting that it is indeed possible to enjoy both Hairspray and Harley-Davidson.

My peers are well-intentioned, but there’s an undeniable touch of irony in their tendency to label someone a “normal high-school student.” Have we become tolerant of everything except the average? A diverse and inspired student body is a beautiful thing, until we find one of us who happens to enjoy some one-on-one basketball with some guys from Myers Park, and we deem this unnatural. When issues of Seventeen and Sports Illustrated must be hidden under our copies of Marx and Niezstche, we’ve lost a carefree aspect of being young. The purpose of art is uninhibited expression; when we can leave our wonderfully enlightened egos behind and become open to the real world, perhaps we can truly consider ourselves artists.