Pulling up beside a teen driver at a red light can be a palpable experience, with booming bass shaking the car floorboards. But stop next to Chase Parker’s car and you’ll more likely hear a violin solo soaring out the window.
Classical music is one of many interests for Parker, who graduates from Shorewood High School next week.
Sure, he’s programmed the classical music station 98.1 FM into his car radio, but he also speaks two languages fluently and is learning two more. He’s written and acted in plays, he’s a soccer referee for a Hispanic league and he’s coached baseball to 10 to 12 year olds for three years. He’s also president of the school’s Associated Student Body.
As for Parker’s arts interests, ballet, theater and opera are venues that see few teens in attendance. But Parker is there often, dragging friends — who become converts — with him.
They stand out in a sea of white and silver hair at opera performances in Seattle.
“The old people see me and their eyes light up,” said Parker, who buys tickets through a program that offers $5 tickets to teens for any arts event at Seattle Center.
Parker got interested in classical music as a child, when he’d play piano tapes to help him sleep.
“But then it’s like: ‘I like this, and I want more,’” Parker said. “It escalated from there.’”
He checks out classical CDs by the bushel from the library, downloads them on his iPod and gets his friends to listen. This spring, Parker pushed his interests further.
“It’s like, ‘I love this so much’ — I e-mailed the opera and said I want to volunteer,” he said.
When they saw his date of birth, Parker said, they contacted him right away: Arts companies are trying hard to attract teens to performances and to the business. Parker is working with outreach and education staff and hopes to visit high schools and educate teens about operas, among other tasks.
Theater is another of Parker’s loves.
He wrote a play called “Channel Love” that ran at the school’s one-act festival this year. It’s about a British couple and a French couple who survive a sinking ship in the English channel. The couples, in accented speech, sing rewritten versions of familiar hits, like “Killing me softly with this cult.”
“I like to write. I have lots of ideas,” said Parker, adding that he has too little time to get them out.
But he’s also acted. It’s something he discovered he loved this year, when he played a role in the school’s musical “Urinetown.” His character, who had to pretend to urinate onstage, was killed in the first act, but Parker asked the director to let him into the chorus for the second.
But theater, music and the arts are only a few of Parker’s interests. He lists his No. 1 passion as languages. He’s fluent in Spanish and French and is learning German and Italian.
Parker took French in seventh grade at Einstein Middle School and decided to take both French and Spanish the next year. He could do that because the Shoreline School District had just added another period on to the middle school day, he said. He continued taking two languages through high school.
The summer after his freshman year, Parker stayed with a family in Geneva, Switzerland through a Shorewood language-immersion program. On the trip were 23 women and no other men.
“It wasn’t so much: ‘Oh man, you’re going with 19 girls,’ as: ‘You’re the little brother,’” Parker said.
He loves languages for many reasons. There’s the travel, there’s talking with a friend in Spanish at school and having others not know what’s being said, there’s the joy of refereeing a Mexican soccer league. And there’s aesthetics.
“The languages are just so beautiful to listen to,” Parker said.
Next year, Parker will attend Seattle University, with a double major in International Business and French.
If he won the lottery and could do anything he wanted, he’d work in public service, for example at a non profit or as a teacher, he said.
But the soaring cost of housing, raising children and college tuition these days makes careers like those hard to pursue, Parker said. He’s an advocate for social equality, but some careers aren’t practical in the modern world, he said.
“My generation will be running into some problems in the future, economically,” he said.
There’s a growing gap between rich and poor, he said.
“Projected college prices in 20 years are $200,000 (for four years),” he said.
He wants to have three or four kids, and he worries they might still be paying off college loans when they’re 45.
Instead, Parker hopes to go into business. He could make life better for people from that end, he said.
And he wants to use his foreign language skills, no matter what he decides to do.
“I want to be able to communicate with other people,” he said. “It’s my biggest interest — being a diverse-minded person.”
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