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Back to No slushies to the face for real-life Glee boys No slushies to the face for real-life Glee boys November 11, 2010 Amy Dempsey If Martin Laws went to William McKinley High School, he would have been paint-balled, hit in the face with a frozen drink or thrown into a dumpster by now. That’s because in the world according to Glee — Fox’s blockbuster TV series about high school show choir — football players shalt not sing. It’s against the rules of the teenage caste system. Duh. For real-life Glee guys, however, it’s a different story. “Do we get picked on?” Laws, a grade 12 student at North Toronto Collegiate Institute, thinks out loud. The tall, broad-shouldered, leatherjacket-wearing 17-year-old is a proud choir kid. “No, no we don’t,” he says, grinning. “No slushies in the face.” Laws’ choir doubled its male membership this school year — a larger trend many N’dere Lindsay-Hedley, a student at the Etobicoke School of the Arts, rehearses along with fellow members of Splash, the school's Glee-like show choir. Lindsay-Hedley also plays music directors are thanking Glee for. basketball, volleyball and soccer. AMY DEMPSEY/TORONTO STAR “It’s like the cool thing to do now,” says George Randolph, who runs a performing arts school in Toronto and co-directs the newly-launched Show Choir Canada. Randolph says musical theatre was slowly but steadily rising in popularity for about five years. Then Glee came along and knocked the ball out of the park. The runaway success of the show has catapulted high school choir into truly trendy terrain and young men across the country are signing up in droves to sing and dance. Randolph, who years ago fell in love with performance art after taking dance to improve his tennis game, says shows like Glee send a message that boys who sing and dance don’t have to fit into a particular mould. “It lets all young men know that it’s okay to be involved in the arts,” he says. When brawny football hunk Finn Hudson joins show choir in Glee’s pilot episode, it doesn’t go over so well. “You’re the QUARTERBACK!” his coach roars. “You make a decision — you’re a football player or you’re a singer!” Laws and his choir buddy Cam Watt both played football for the North Toronto Norsemen last year and faced a Finn-like ultimatum when they returned to school in September. In their case, the pressure didn’t come from a fired-up coach. Both boys took a look at their busy senior-year schedules and realized they had to make some cuts. So they quit football. “I sometimes miss it,” says Watt. The 16-year-old former quarterback says it’s especially tough to be on the sidelines when his former team takes the field. Watt had to choose between choir, football and hockey, since he made the Don Mills Flyers Midget AAA team this year. Football was the loser. Do his hockey buddies know he sings in the school choir? Watt says it hasn’t come up with his new team yet. “It’s not a question of hiding it by any means,” he says. “It's just that the main topics in the dressing room don’t usually include choir music.” When he graduates in the spring, Watt plans to take a year off to chase his twin dreams. He’s pursuing a folk rock career under the stage name The 2nd Child. And he hopes to make the Junior A hockey team. Laws misses football sometimes, but admits he wasn’t a fantastic player to begin with. For him, quitting the team wasn’t a huge deal. “At our school it’s definitely okay to do a bunch of different things, and excel academically, too,” he says. For Laws, that includes being student council president and applying to universities. And if he has time, he plans to join a curling club this winter. Across town at the Etobicoke School of the Arts, glee club is a bit more intense. Students who want to snag a spot in Splash, the school’s 28-member show choir, have to compete against more than 100 other hopefuls. More boys turned out for Splash auditions this year than ever before and the school’s overall male enrolment shot up. “Every grade — 9, 10, 11 and 12 — has the most boys we’ve ever had at ESA,” says Paul Aikins, the group’s artistic director. Because his kids love Glee, many of the songs Aikins chose this year are inspired by the show, including ‘Somebody to Love,’ ‘Don’t Stop Believin’’ and ‘Like a Prayer.’ Even though ESA is an arts-focused school, Aikins says many of his kids are athletes. “I’m a big supporter of compromising and trying to let them fit everything in,” he says. N’dere Lindsay-Hedley, a sweater vest and tie-wearing 16-year-old, plays basketball, soccer and volleyball. How does he have time for it all with twice-weekly Splash rehearsals? “Um, it’s a lot of work,” he says. Lindsay-Hedley says he can relate to Finn because he often feels pulled in different directions. His parents encourage him to focus on music and performance, while many of his buddies outside of ESA are all about sports. “Some of my friends are like, ‘What are you doing? Come back to the light.’ ” He says the bonus of doing both is that many of the physical benefits of dance — flexibility, for example — help him out in sport. But the grade 11 student knows that when he gets closer to graduation, he will have to decide what’s more important to him. “At some point I’m going to have to focus on one or the other. Right now it’s just a discovery process.” At North Toronto, choir is a little more O Canada; a little less rock and roll. The experience isn’t quite as glamorous, but still, there are what director Carol Ratzlaff describes as “Glee moments.” “I was wondering,” Ratzlaff says to about 25 senior choir members during an afternoon rehearsal in October, “if for the first half of the year you’d like to do some pieces from music theatre like — ” The room erupts in whoops and cheers and her suggestion, Les Miserables, is drowned out. Yes. They would like that very much. The senior members will also get to perform a solo for the group — anything they want, so long as it’s from a musical. Watt and Laws love that choir gives them the opportunity to sing pieces they likely wouldn’t pick for themselves or even listen to otherwise. “If we were just with our buddies on the weekend and I pulled out Les Miserables, I think that would be a problem,” Laws says. He and Watt crack up. “Turning down Black Eyed Peas and turning up ‘I dreamed a dream’ wouldn’t really work.” It likely wouldn’t fly in the dressing room either..

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