Save this article to read it later.
Find this story in your accountsSaved for Latersection.
In kindergarten, two kids accused me of lying about how far away India was.
(I said something like halfway around the world.)
Girls added girl stuff: lack of bra, hair on legs.
Most childhood memories involve at least two surviving parties.
This equality of concern makes one mid-season episode, Posh, soar.
Maya (Maya Erskine) claims that affection first.
The conceit: They are the Spice Girls, only as elderly women in need of calcium.
Erskines and Konkles actual lives serve as material for the show.
The 31-year-old co-creators play middle schoolers, in a cast of kids.
The rig turns coming-of-age tropes avant-garde.
As writers and performers, they revisit ground theyve spent enough time away from to understand its subtler contours.
(Like her character, she has one Japanese parent.)
She became the jester, she recalls.
Konkle, meanwhile, grew up in an ultraliberal community.
God was a woman; her minister was gay.
Everyone, including her, was very white.
Anna types into an Ask Jeeves portal, in a scene that links the episodes first and second acts.
(The show uses period detail to conjure a nameless American any town of the late 1990s.)
When she later attempts to stage a tolerance rally for Maya, Anna only isolates her friend further.
The jester archetype can bea refugefor a lot of people.
I discovered it after junior high, when my parents insisted I switch schools due to all the bullying.
Injustice affected everyone there.
Classes segregated us into honors versus regulars, white versus black and Latinx based on resources.
The difficulties of all sorts of people were on display, often starker than mine.
After many failed attempts, I found myself cast as the understudy for a lead role in a play.
Another girl dropped the part, not wanting to spend time or lose ego as a backup.
The director suggested I put on an Indian accent.
The play was by Moliere, the famous French writer, set in 17th-century France.
The others spoke infauxFrench accents.
I played a maidservant, and spoke like Apu.
Erskines face doesnt register unhappiness, exactly, in the scene that depicts her minstrelsy.
She laughs as she hunches over as Guido, and seems confused as she plays along.
I played along, too, as I spoke Molieres words in a silly accent under lights.
On the heels of my performance, I got another role, as a genie in a one-act play.
It is hard to recall how I played both roles.
I know I felt shame, and saw myself playing my scenes as if from a distance.
Were those notes of unease in the laughs?
Was the audience also disoriented?
Had I landed partsbecausethey were for a maid, a genie?
To what extent did I enable my own humiliation?
In college, a girl from my high school emailed me an apology.
It seemed shed taken a sociology class that made her wonder if I ever felt lesser than my peers.
If shed played any part in that sensation, she was sorry, she wrote me.
I read the message and felt, inexplicably, more pain than before I read it.
So, too, does Mayas face crumple as she stands by her locker during the tolerance rally.
On it is taped a paper scrawled with I am Japanese!!
The scribe, Maya learns, is none other than her supposed best friend Anna.
Lost in her own good intentions, she masterminds a hallway demonstration meant to end racism.
Mayas face crumples; Anna has a hopeful smile on hers.
It cast into doubt my sense of self, which still hinged heavily on others sense of me.
I couldnt watch Posh enough times.
Each watch seemed to reveal another facet of a fable once restricted to my memory.
On my latest, I fixated on a character unmentioned as yet in the many reviews of the show.
Becca, played by Sami Rappoport, is the most strident of the mean girls.
She doesnt succeed, but the righteousness of her energy cant be missed.
At first glance, Becca isnt prime bully material.
She looks more like a potential target.
Shes soft and round, awkward in a skirt that looks too small for her.
His proximity to abject nerdiness made me feel under even more threat.
I kept a distance.
She includes in that group her invented and past selves.
