Transcript
Speaker: Happy Monday or whatever day it is that you're listening to this.
Speaker: It's another episode of Dirty Brief and I'm going to tell you guys a little confession.
Speaker: Are you a priest?
Speaker: Are you sitting in the back of a church with a screen behind you?
Speaker: Because I am ready to confess all of my sins.
Speaker: Although...
Speaker: This one's not really a sin.
Speaker: I am a high school dropout.
Speaker: I know.
Speaker: You guys are like, what?
Speaker: But Alex, you are the epitome of academic scholarship.
Speaker: And I'm like, I know.
Speaker: Hold back.
Speaker: Because it won't surprise you to know that I dropped out of high school and I was expelled from college.
Speaker: My rebellious attitude just can't follow the rules of a school.
Speaker: But it's not my fault.
Speaker: It's not.
Speaker: I was set up to fail in school from an early age.
Speaker: You see, when I was only in fourth grade, I was put into classes called gifted and talented.
Speaker: There was standard, there was honors, and there was gifted and talented.
Speaker: Now, I'll be honest, even at an elementary school age, I thought this was pretty cruel.
Speaker: Telling kids immediately that they're standard is
Speaker: That they're never going to be anything more than the average?
Speaker: Just a regular Joe Schmo or Jane Schmain?
Speaker: No.
Speaker: I don't like that at all.
Speaker: Nobody is standard.
Speaker: We're all unique flowers just doing our best to blossom in a beautiful world.
Speaker: But...
Speaker: They told me early on that I was gifted and talented.
Speaker: And they told me that I was already reading at a 12th grade reading level when I was only in fifth grade.
Speaker: And when they told me I was gifted and talented, I took that as my excuse to never try again in school ever again.
Speaker: Why should I?
Speaker: I'm gifted and talented.
Speaker: I don't need to do your baseless activities of things that I don't care about.
Speaker: It set me up to fail.
Speaker: And by the time I got to my senior year in college or in high school, now listen,
Speaker: I didn't even go to a regular high school.
Speaker: I went to a magnet school focusing on acting.
Speaker: So I already was doing less the amount of work than a normal student.
Speaker: I was getting to do acting classes every single day that I went.
Speaker: And yet still, even then, I could not adhere to the social norms of doing my homework.
Speaker: I hated doing all this stuff.
Speaker: So I get the senior year and I say, that's it.
Speaker: I'm not going anymore.
Speaker: I was three days in.
Speaker: My parents couldn't physically force me to go.
Speaker: So I just slept for two weeks and didn't go to school.
Speaker: I refused to go.
Speaker: They weren't sure what to do.
Speaker: They weren't going to physically beat me because back then, even back then, I mean, they're not the type anyway, but I wasn't the type to take it.
Speaker: Again, my rebellious spirit was taken over inside of me.
Speaker: But what they did is they got me a medical excuse saying that I was having a lot of depression issues, a lot of rage issues.
Speaker: And so they set me up in this program called the Home and Hospital Program.
Speaker: Now, I didn't even know this existed.
Speaker: In fact, most of you probably don't know this exists because why would you?
Speaker: You probably were just going to school like a standard individual, but not me.
Speaker: I wasn't putting up with that.
Speaker: The home and hospital program is what they did for kids who were either expelled because of violent behavior or they had a medical condition that meant they couldn't go to school or a lot of them
Speaker: were pregnant teenagers who couldn't go to school because they were pregnant or had already had a baby.
Speaker: So they were continuing their education, but from their home.
Speaker: And the way this would work is they brought us a phone to our home.
Speaker: You would dial into a classroom and there would be one teacher on sitting in a booth somewhere, undisclosed location, secret shit.
Speaker: And then we would all call in and have a group conference call to the classroom.
Speaker: And it was the same like education as going to regular school.
Speaker: Like I didn't get a special degree or something like that.
Speaker: My degree is still a high school diploma.
Speaker: And what's crazy is those classes, first of all, I only had to go for three hours, three hours every two days or something like that.
Speaker: It was nothing, nothing.
Speaker: I had to take English and I had to take math and they were the most basic classes you could ever take.
Speaker: I mean, we were reading Shakespeare over the phone performing.
Speaker: And of course I'm performing.
Speaker: Why wouldn't I be performing Shakespeare over the phone?
Speaker: But the rest of the kids in my class, there was one kid who hit another kid in the head with a board, which is why he was at home.
Speaker: There was a lot of pregnant moms or teenage moms.
Speaker: So many of them.
Speaker: It's like oftentimes you would hear babies crying in the background.
Speaker: And here's how this class would work.
Speaker: The teacher, she had a computer screen and she had all of our phone numbers on a screen.
Speaker: And anytime one of us was speaking, there would be a little Pac-Man head that would say that would be go next to our phone number.
Speaker: So she would say, okay, right now, Alex is the one who's speaking.
Speaker: But sometimes this woman would make the mistake of telling us that their screen was broken.
Speaker: So please identify yourself before you begin to speak.
Speaker: What did this cause?
Speaker: Bedlam.
Speaker: Chaos.
Speaker: Anarchy.
Speaker: None of us already want to be in school.
Speaker: So, of course, we just start making all these weird sounds so she doesn't know where they're coming from.
Speaker: We're like, oh!
Speaker: and she'd be like, who's doing that?
Speaker: Stop doing it.
Speaker: And we would make her cut class.
Speaker: She'd be like, that's it.
Speaker: We're not having class today.
Speaker: Obviously you guys are not mature enough to handle this.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: No shit.
Speaker: That's the point.
Speaker: That's why so many of us are in here because we can't exist in a normal school.
Speaker: So you tell us that there is a loophole to getting around class for the day.
Speaker: We're going to take it.
Speaker: This woman literally had to kick teenage moms out of class some days because their babies wouldn't stop crying.
Speaker: And you would hear the girl in the background like, shut up, please, please.
Speaker: I'm trying to learn.
Speaker: Pretty hilarious, if you ask me.
Speaker: Pretty hilarious.
Speaker: I went to school like that for three and a half months until the winter semester was about to begin, the second half of my senior year.
Speaker: At which point, the superintendent of Baltimore County School Board said, Alex has to go back to regular school.
Speaker: Otherwise, he'll have to get a GED.
Speaker: But I refused to do that.
Speaker: So my mom, being a lawyer, she talked down the superintendent to going to school full time.
Speaker: I would only go every other day for two classes, English and acting.
Speaker: That's all I had to do to graduate.
Speaker: And so I did it.
Speaker: I went.
Speaker: And I don't remember much of that time period of my life because I was smoking a lot of pot and I was just doing everything I could to just be a curmudgeon-y asshole teenager.
Speaker: But you'll be surprised to learn, as I was surprised to learn, that somehow after taking a year off, I went to community college and took very base level classes like Health 101 and History 101, Theater 101, the easiest possible way that I could just take some classes so I wouldn't get kicked out of my parents' house.
Speaker: I was serving tables at Ruby Tuesday in the meantime, still smoking a lot of weed.
Speaker: And that's what I was doing.
Speaker: I was smoking weed and I was going to class sometimes.
Speaker: So then it gets to a point where all my friends are at college.
Speaker: I'm home alone.
Speaker: I've made some new friends with the servers and things like that.
Speaker: But I want to go to college.
Speaker: I want to get out of Baltimore.
Speaker: So I applied to a school in Pittsburgh where a few of my friends are already going.
Speaker: Point Park University.
Speaker: Somehow in my transcript, I graduated high school with like a 3.2 GPA.
Speaker: And I don't know how I did that, but I got nominated for a scholarship called the presidential scholarship.
Speaker: And it was comprised of your academics, 3.2 GPA, your leadership skills, of which I had zero, and your community service, of which I had not even done the necessary 75 hours that I had to do from middle school to high school to complete a regular graduation.
Speaker: Somehow they just gave it to me.
Speaker: I don't know what I did.
Speaker: I have no idea.
Speaker: I think I slipped through the cracks somehow.
Speaker: So I get nominated for the scholarship.
Speaker: 250 kids get nominated.
Speaker: 50 are going to get it.
Speaker: And this is a $40,000 scholarship, $10,000 per year to go to school.
Speaker: This is huge.
Speaker: And I knew I could get the scholarship.
Speaker: I knew I could go in because I've always been able to talk my way into and out of situations.
Speaker: Even when I was at my worst, my mouth was constantly doing the work of someone that was much more intelligent than I was.
Speaker: So,
Speaker: I go to Pittsburgh to go do this interview.
Speaker: And I'm looking at the other students that are around me.
Speaker: And these are like, you know, pure, like kids that look like they really cared about academics.
Speaker: Kids that were a type A that really wanted to excel in school and impress their parents and their teachers.
Speaker: Not me.
Speaker: I went in and saw that the guy had a Baltimore Orioles hat on his desk.
Speaker: And I was like, oh, Orioles, huh?
Speaker: And he goes, yeah, you a fan.
Speaker: I was like, I'm from Baltimore.
Speaker: Of course I am.
Speaker: But then he just goes, wow, you think they're going to be good this year?
Speaker: And I was like, you know, you never know with the Orioles.
Speaker: And he goes, ain't that the truth?
Speaker: And he said, so tell me something about you that I wouldn't know by looking at your transcript.
Speaker: So I said, okay.
Speaker: I dropped out of high school.
Speaker: And he goes, really?
Speaker: That's not in here.
Speaker: And I was like, I know.
Speaker: I dropped out of high school.
Speaker: And he looked at me, he was, you know what?
Speaker: That's exactly what this school needs.
Speaker: We need students who know when high school is not challenging them to the level that they require and they are ready to step up into a higher level of learning.
Speaker: I can't tell you this officially, but unofficially between us, you're going to get the scholarship.
Speaker: And I was like, yeah, I know.
Speaker: And he goes, how did you know?
Speaker: And I said, because I'm gifted and talented.
Speaker: Later on, my rebellious ways would take me
Speaker: to my comedy journey.
Speaker: And that is where a place where I can truly use my railing against the rules to my advantage, because in comedy, there are no rules.
Speaker: You do it the way you want to do it.
Speaker: You make your own rules.
Speaker: You push boundaries.
Speaker: You break the format to do things that nobody has ever done before so that you can excel.
Speaker: And if
Speaker: There's a proper way to do something.
Speaker: I can't do it that way.
Speaker: My brain says no.
Speaker: Putting together IKEA furniture is a nightmare because it is a step-by-step instruction.
Speaker: I need to figure it out my own way.
Speaker: The same way that I figured out how to go to school, how to go to phone school, how to eventually lead my way into a $40,000 scholarship is the same reason why I'm successful in comedy because I don't go by the status quo.
Speaker: I do what I want to do.
Speaker: And I find a way to make it work for me.
Speaker: And when I think about that, I know I'm going to be okay.
Speaker: It's difficult because sometimes the river is running and you are trying your best to paddle upstream.
Speaker: But when you find that little tributary that's going your way and you carve your own path, magic.
Speaker: happens, especially when you're gifted and talented.
Speaker: Thanks for being here, everybody.
Speaker: Go check out my website, hoopercomedy.com because some good shows are coming up.
Speaker: I hope you had a lovely Thanksgiving holiday, Christmas coming soon, Hanukkah, and everything else that you celebrate in this ridiculous blue green globe that we call a planet.
Speaker: I love you so much.
Speaker: I'll see you next week.
