Stephanie Lentz and her admiring boyfriend, Chris Oakes, were photographed by Kathy Richland at a preprom party in May 2000. Stephanie and I spoke the following January in the town house she grew up in, just west of Old Town. The neighborhood was “pretty rough when my parents first moved here,” she told me. “Now it’s yuppie mania.”
I’ve really enjoyed my time in the city–having grown up here is a pretty neat thing. Because it’s so diverse, and you’re really exposed to a lot as you grow up, and you become used to all different kinds of people and situations that most kids, most of the people I meet at BC, don’t know anything about. Lab is an incredibly diverse school. Every year we celebrated holidays like Diwali and Kwanza, and we had traditional Asian dances in our assemblies. I look through my yearbook, and there are so many Jewish kids, Asian kids, black kids. I always liked that about my school. And I don’t see that as much at BC. For most kids, I think, going to college is a more diverse experience than what they’re used to, but for me it’s probably a little bit of the opposite. A lot of kids at BC are from these huge suburban public rah-rah football schools with a thousand kids in a class. My high school didn’t even have football. We didn’t have cheerleading, we had dance troupe. When people at BC hear that, they can’t believe it. But everyone did their own thing at Lab. I think it’s the sort of place where individuals, and people who maybe in other schools would not be accepted socially into every group, can find their own place. And it’s also a school where being smart is respected by the students.
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Being away from my boyfriend is really hard. It’s just bad luck that at this time of our life we need to be on opposite ends of the country. He’s going to Occidental, it’s a small school in California. He really likes it. But he’s in California and I’m in Boston, and there’s nothing we can do about that. His name is Chris, he’s the guy in the picture.
I’d say it looks like the end. I know there’s something beginning after it, but that photo of me at my senior prom, it’s like the end of my entire Lab School career–the end of my childhood, I guess.
