Stuck in the Middle - School Daze
Snap Judgment
Snap Judgment and PRX
4.7 • 11.5K Ratings
🗓️ 18 September 2025
⏱️ 51 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Drama Club is the happy, safe space for Lee and Parker until their school play becomes a homophobic middle school meltdown. The lights get turned up to 10, the adults are in a media frenzy, and the kids are just trying to figure it all out.
STORIES
Don’t Say Gay Dads
Drama Club is the happy, safe space for Lee and Parker until their school play becomes a homophobic middle school meltdown. The lights get turned up to 10, the adults are in a media frenzy, and the kids are just trying to figure it all out.
This story contains descriptions of abuse directed at gay persons. Please take care while listening.
A very big thank you to Lee and Parker—who are best friends to this day. Thanks as well to Jamie McGonnigal.
Produced by Mark Betancourt, original score by Dirk Schwarzhoff. Artwork by Teo Ducot.
Playground Bullies and Dark Secrets
In middle school, Mike has a secret. But no one has ever seen “it.”
This was performed at Snap LIVE in Los Angeles.
“Mighty” Mike McGee is an international spoken word artist, writer, performer, speaker, slam poet and comic. McGee is the first slam poet to win both the American National Poetry Slam Individual Grand Championship and the Individual World Poetry Slam Championship.
Original score composed and performed by Alex Mandel, Tim Frick, and David Brandt.
Season 16 – Episode 45
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| 0:00.0 | Introducing the five-year price guarantee from Xfinity. |
| 0:10.9 | No matter how your life or your taste and music changes in five years, |
| 0:14.7 | your internet price will stay exactly the same. |
| 0:17.7 | Restrictions apply new residential customers only, |
| 0:20.1 | taxes and fees extra and subject to change. |
| 0:32.6 | Growing up, there's a kid in my school, |
| 0:36.3 | in my grade that attends my church. And we go to our church |
| 0:39.9 | like four or five times a week. So I know this kid. Well, our families hang out, spend time |
| 0:48.0 | at each other's houses. We're both farm boys. Sometimes we'll even help out each other with chores. |
| 0:55.3 | And back then, I couldn't have told you that our church was a crazy, wacky cult led by a madman. |
| 1:04.2 | I don't yet have this understanding. |
| 1:07.4 | I just know somehow that what we do, |
| 1:12.9 | running around, preparing for the end of days and all that, |
| 1:17.6 | is probably not something you want to talk about in school. |
| 1:23.1 | And I've got enough trouble as it is, trying to avoid any hint of crazy. |
| 1:27.9 | And this kid, he independently comes to the same understanding. |
| 1:33.8 | So at school, we do not hang out. |
| 1:38.7 | We do not speak to each other. |
| 1:42.2 | And it's amazing to look back now, after all the insanity that eventually does go down |
| 1:50.3 | from that cult in both of our lives, that the only other person that could possibly have |
| 1:58.8 | understood, really understood in all of the world. |
| 2:04.9 | I pushed away, hoping that if maybe they didn't see us together, |
... |
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