There's a Lima Loser in All of Us!

It’s Never Been Cooler to Be a Lima Loser

You either love it or hate it. And if you hate it, you probably don’t get it.

            Glee.

            On the surface, it’s a show about a group of sappy-sweet highschoolers obsessed with 80’s ballads, competing in a show choir from a podunk Ohio town. The cast of characters appears to be cartoonish stereotypes; there’s the teacher’s pet, the jock, the cheerleader (sorry, cheerio), the black girl, the Asian girl, the gay kid, and the dude in the wheelchair. But, this is high school through the eyes of Ryan Murphy, the show’s producer, who created the softcore primetime porn melodrama Nip/Tuck.

            Murphy’s influence is felt in every episode. Who else can find the funny in a storyline about a woman faking her a pregnancy long enough to buy a baby from a knocked-up cheerleader? Or provide dialogue gems such as: “Your husband is hiding his keilbasa in a Hickory Farms gift basket that doesn’t belong to you.”

            But for as fantastical as the show often gets, Murphy and his team keep the show grounded in reality by setting it in a real Ohio town—the little nowhere burg of Lima, on the Western side of the state, halfway between Dayton and Toledo.

            Why not Chicago? Or Milwaukee? Or even Columbus? Lima is such a random town. What about it inspired Murphy to base a series around their show choir? Is there some connection to the school itself? Did real-life events shape the cult phenomenon?

            Well, yes. Kind of. But mostly no.

            “I don’t watch the show,” says Steve Popa, Lima Senior High’s choir director, a skinny man with a thin beard who looks like a supporting character from a Christopher Guest movie. “Okay, I watched the pilot, actually. But I didn’t care for it.”

            Turns out Ryan Murphy is not from Lima. Neither are the writers as far as he knows. And, outside of picking up some local newspapers, the show has done nothing to reach out to the school it often mocks—choir members are often referred to as “Lima losers.”

            Here, choir is not an after-school activity, but a yearlong class that meets three days every week, at the God-awful hour of 7:15 a.m. They do not, under any circumstances, cover Queen’s catalogue. Currently Lima’s show choir is practicing an arrangement of South American tunes for their Spring “Fiesta” concert. Selena’s “Baila Esta Cumbia.” “I Go to Rio,” from The Boy From Oz.

            Also, Glee is not about competition. Okay, there’s competition—it’s called an “adjudicated event”. But that’s, like, not even important.

            “In the TV show, that’s the only thing you see. We focus more on the three concerts each year. And we have five ensembles. Not just a show choir.”

            Life in real Lima is a little less…shiny. The kids have bad skin. Some smell like half a can of Axe body spray. Many have already paired up with their erstwhile soul mate.

            Lima, itself, is not so much a suburb, as it’s portrayed. Not anymore, anyway. This school used to be bursting with 2500 students. Now, it’s around 1500. It’s the manufacturing. Went bust, like the rest of the Rust Belt. Westinghouse is gone. So is that prison. Lots of jobs disappeared with them. It’s mostly a wait-and-see what’s next. If it gets much worse, Lima show choir will be in the crosshairs—arts, after all, are always the first to be cut.

            “There are kids in my choir who have never been outside of Lima,” says Popa. “Never been outside of town, except for a wedding or a funeral.”

            As if on cue, a young man appears at his office door. “Won’t be in Thursday or Friday, did you get the note?”

            Popa: “No.”

            Kid: “Funeral.”

            What Popa really digs about his job, though, are the opportunities through choir that allow him to show some of the world to his group. “I remember one of these kids I took on a trip, a performance at the Palmer House Hilton in Chicago. It was an Honor Choir event. He had never seen such opulence.”

            One business that is booming is new music for high school choirs—arrangements of songs featured on Glee are being pimped by every sheet music warehouse in the country. Looks like Lima’s choir will perform “Jump” this year. Not that Popa will change his mind about the show. “It’s not reality,” he says with a shrug.

            “I’m appalled at some of the liberties they take,” says Lima English teacher Jeannine Jordan-Squire, who claims a Masters in Pop Culture from Bowling Greene. Her creative writing class effing loves Glee. Seriously, don’t get them started. Jordan-Squire loves it too, even though it gets almost everything wrong.

            “There was this one episode,” she says, “where the show choir, on a whim, goes to another school halfway across the state to check out the competition. I’m trying to raise $200 for a 25-minute trip to Bluffton. No one involved in that show ever spent time with a teacher.”

            Also, Real Lima is much more diverse.

            “If that’s code for ‘we have a lot of poor black kids,’ then yes,” she says. “This is real. There is nothing suburban about it. 70% of our students are on the free lunch program. 50% are minorities.”

            But there’s one thing Glee gets right. That spirit, that almost cult-like glow from each of the polished Hollywood-ized choir members? The energy that comes from a group of kids that would never talk to each other outside the choir room? Yeah, that’s here.

            “If a kid gets passionate about something, it’ll take over their life. That’s what’s exciting to watch. You’ll see it. It could be kids that are really into a Christian Youth Group. Sometimes its historical reenactment. But if they connect with something here, you see it transcend these social barriers, these clicks. Then, you will have the jock and the geek and minority all getting together on something. They don’t care. They’re just passionate about something together.”

            Something round goes flying across the row of computers next to her desk.

            “Are you being a force for chaos?” she asks.

            It’s a line from a Ryan Murphy show. Or should be.

 -James Renner James@clevelandindependent.com