The company I’ve the privilege of working with does an annual company photo and this year the responsibility of doing the bulk of the organizing and planning has fallen on me. This in no way is something I am going to complain about. It’s really exciting and actually makes my day go by really quickly. You’d be surprised how much research can be done about cost effectiveness of buying digital photo prints in bulk.

A few days ago was the first visit to a location for the shoot which was found as the result of several days of scouting. Where was this location, you wonder? Perhaps a fancy hotel lobby? A grand staircase in a historical building in old downtown? An elaborate foyer of a beautifully restored estate? No. None of those. It was a high school a few blocks from the office.

I didn’t really think much of it, having been a high school senior a mere five years ago. I’d been to high schools, understood how they work: the bells, the common areas, the parking lots. I never imagined that I’d feel more like I was on a movie set than on an actual high school campus. Have you seen Grease? Pay It Forward? She’s All That? Clueless? HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL? The scenes where they sit outside and eat their lunch, walk between classes in the sunshine, use their locker in the great outdoors, or WALK ON THE QUAD?? What kind of high school has a quad?? Apparently every high school in California does.

Where I grew up, high school took place indoors. You know why? The sun is only out an average of around 60 days per year where I grew up. [Compared to the average of 267 days here in Fresno.] Most days at my high school consisted of “perilous weather” — i.e. hail, damaging winds, snow, freezing rain, thunder storms, tornadoes, blizzards, sleet, black ice, [way] below freezing temperatures. Most days at my high school were not days when you would want to be outside.

[This would be a good time to mention that it has been overcast a total of 1 morning since I moved here. ONE. There was only one morning out of the 2 months that I have been driving to work where sunglasses weren’t imperative to my safe arrival at my place of employment.]

Come to think of it, it was the bookend days right at the beginning and end of the school year that were really the days you wanted to be outside. That good weather spent indoors always added to the pain of high school — making the first few weeks a bigger drag and the last weeks seem to last forever.

Every time I had a moment to stop and realize where I was spending my Tuesday morning, I felt like I was on a movie set. This was nothing like a place that would bring back memories of high school for a person like me. This building didn’t resemble anything that matched the concept within my memory, save for a few stills gathered from [sometimes] repetitive watching of the aforementioned films, false memories if you will.

I can only wonder if people who have only ever known California high schools as their basis for the concept would feel like they were on the set of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off or The Breakfast Club when they visited my high school? Maybe that’s why I liked those movies better than the ones set at California style high schools? Maybe it’s because they were better films?