'IT WAS MY BUDDY, my goofy and loving and hilarious friend. He was being kicked. He probably had never harmed anyone in his life and he was curled in the little ball and a mob of kids were kicking him and laughing."
I was at Boys' Latin of Philadelphia Charter School last week listening to a group of high-schoolers say these words, Greek chorus-style, during a rehearsal of their original show, "PHLash: A Mob Story." They will perform it tonight through Saturday.
My heart beat faster and my palms got clammy. I got that tugging feeling at the bottom of my stomach that tells you something is wrong.
They were talking about my boyfriend. They were talking about the person I come home to every night and the person I watched slowly heal after my friends and I crossed paths with a flash mob on June 25. It left us all shaken and Emily Guendelsberger with a broken leg. They were talking about the person who I watched wide-eyed as he slept that night to make sure his chest kept rising and falling.
"They turned from monsters back into kids," the students intoned together to end the piece.
The words they were speaking came from my friend, Meghan Donnelly. Scott Sheldon, an English teacher at Boys' Latin, and the play's dramaturg, had asked Meg to share her experience. Meg's words became a part of the play made up of 43 interviews - from police to Occupy Philly protesters to the NAACP to a kid who had participated in the flash mobs - that make up the docudrama style show.
For the most part, the boys conducted their own interviews. Marqeas Woolford-Johnson, a 15-year-old from North Philly, took to interviewing so well they wrote him a part in the show. "Our teacher said the interview questions were a guide not a map, so I just went off on it," Woolford-Johnson said.
Woolford-Johnson first learned about flash mobs from the news, which he normally avoids because he prefers to "stay happy."
"My thesis question was [that a flash mob] was a youth protest that had no purpose and with no purpose it turned violent," said Gregory DeCandia, head of theater at Boys' Latin and the producing artistic director of theater company BCKSEET Productions.
For the most part, the students seemed to agree with DeCandia. Seon Gilding, 16, said he was at one of the South Street flash mobs in 2010, but only because he heard there were girls there.
