A Quote by Matt Duffer

When we were kids, the type of friends we hung out with were more creative types. — © Matt Duffer
When we were kids, the type of friends we hung out with were more creative types.
A lot of my friends were a lot into theatre a lot earlier than I was. A lot of my friends were kids who were in The Broadway Kids and the kids auditioning for Gavroche in 'Les Miz.' I was never that kid. I was weaned on Michael Jackson. Not literally, because that would have been odd.
There's a rich family culture in South Central. The block that I grew up on, all the kids were best friends. They hung out at each other's houses. I can knock on the person's house two doors down and grab some food and just hang out or go into the backyard and play basketball when they're not there.
My nana was always a widow as long as I was alive; my grandfather died before I was born. All the women on my street - there were four houses in a row with all old women who lived alone who were widowed. They all had kids, but they were all widowed. My mom didn't put me in preschool; I didn't know that was a thing. I just hung out with these women all day.
All my friends were cheerleaders, and I was the girl who hung out at home. I just worked on my music all the time.
I was a hop-around. I hung out with the rockabilly crew, the guys who were trying to be rappers, the funny kids.
Something else was different when we were young: our parents were outdoors. I’m not saying they were joining health clubs and things of that sort, but they were out of the house, out on the porch, talking to neighbors. As far as physical fitness goes, today’s kids are the sorriest generation in the history of the United States. Their parents may be out jogging, but the kids just aren’t outside.
High school wasn't so bad though because, by then, I had worked out that there were far more nerdy kids and poor kids than there were rich, popular kids, so, at the very least, we had them outnumbered.
Even as a kid, I was a businessman. I figured out that if you plucked all the berries off my neighbor's tree and smashed them up, they made a Nickelodeon Gak-type consistency. I sold them to all the neighborhood kids and made stacks of quarters. Of course, the berries were poisonous, and I got in all types of trouble.
I was never happy, and neither were many of my friends. We were just normal kids that were not so excellent at what society wanted from us at that time.
I moved from Kentucky to Miramar, Florida, at about 8. I think I was in second grade. I still had my Southern accent, and down there, you got to experience a melting pot in full fury. All the kids I hung out with were, like, Sicilian kids from Jersey and New York.
You know, as kids were weren't jazz musicians or anything. But, the circle of friends and the neighborhood I lived in, we were really big Rush freaks and Yes fans. We would listen to 'Close to the Edge' and 'Hemispheres' and '2112' - the more artsy, progressive stuff. Some of the guys were into King Crimson and Genesis and all that.
There were the usual types of things that happen, in a production, like logistical bullshit, and this and that and the other. That's the sort of stuff that happened. But I never felt, in a creative sense, that we were ever veering into a place that I hadn't signed on for.
Building and tinkering were such a huge part of our childhood, whether we were trying to entertain ourselves as kids, helping our parents out on the ranch, or getting creative with school projects.
I was an athlete, so I hung out with the jocks. I was smart, so I hung out with the nerdy kids. I was also into theater, so I hung out with the misfits... So I was always in different groups, and those groups never quite overlapped. The racial part of it was just another one of those groups, in one sense.
I grew up with parents who were English professors at Wichita State University, and we were more liberal-minded as a family than most of the people I hung out with in Wichita. During summers, we went off to Telluride, Colorado, where I've returned every summer since I was born.
In some communities it is - like, for me, coming out with my parents, they were not accepting; they were not understanding. So it depends. For kids in New York and L.A., maybe it's different, but for kids in Iowa, for kids in Tennessee, it's still something that's not really talked about.
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