My hometown is a movie star
MANY are seeing themselves in “Lady Bird” (out now), Greta Gerwig’s solo directorial debut about a Catholic high-school girl (Saoirse Ronan, pictured above with co-star Lucas Hedges) who dreams of leaving her humble hometown for New York City. The film perfectly captures growing up in the suburbs in the late ’90s and early aughts, when cellphones were “just for emergencies” and Dave Matthews Band’s “Crash Into Me” sounded impossibly romantic.
But for students and alums of one California high school, the resemblance to their own lives is particularly uncanny in this film. I know, because I went to the school myself.
Ronan’s Lady Bird graduates from a fictional all-girls Catholic high school called Immaculate Heart in 2003. In real life, Gerwig graduated from St. Francis, a Catholic high school in Sacramento, in 2002.
I graduated in 1998. I roamed the halls in the same polyester pleated skirt Lady Bird wears, tested out my fresh driver’s license on the same sweeping Sacramento streets the movie lovingly depicts, crushed on a cute, young math teacher who bore a striking resemblance to a character in the film and formed the sort of close female friendships — uniquely fortified by single-sex education and minor rebellions against the nuns — that the characters in the movie have.
The halls of St. Francis — and the Facebook feeds of its alums — are buzzing.
“The students are really excited,” says Cheryl Watson, the drama teacher at St. Francis who taught Gerwig years ago and remembers her fondly as a “really intelligent” and “very intuitive” actress. (My own work in Watson’s class was less memorable.)
Watson, whose daughter is friends with Gerwig and has a small part in the film, says, “Even though it was fictional . . . the essence and the heart are very much like St. Francis.”
Sydney Bembry agrees. She graduated in May and left Sacramento for NYC.
“I was astonished to see how much the story reflected my life over the past year, mostly Lady Bird’s relationship with her mom and her desire to escape Sacramento for the East Coast,” says Bembry, 18, and a freshman at St. John’s University in Queens. “I texted my mom immediately after the movie ended [and said], ‘I love you, and I’m sorry I was such an a-- hole last year.’”