Achieving goals is the single most important aspect of life. Since sophomore year, I have been telling myself that I will be the lead in Arrowhead’s school musical my senior year. My whole family has been involved with singing and I am no exception. In eighth grade I had the opportunity to be Tevya in the play, the fiddler on the roof. This was a big step for me because eighth grade is the year where a teenager starts to worry about his appearance. What will it look like to the girls if I am in a musical? Once I got passed being embarrassed, I started to have fun memorizing lines and singing several songs.
Opening night of the show went so well that we decided to do another night of the play. After the last night, I was relieved yet sad that the play was over. It was so much fun.
I told myself that I still was a sports guy. That’s what I was going to do in high school; basketball, volleyball, football, and baseball.


Freshman year came around. I was scared of going to arrowhead with a class of over 600 kids. I just graduated from one of 34. A bit of a difference if you ask me, but I became used to it and it turned out to be better because I could choose who I wanted to be friends with. I tried out for the volleyball team and had a blast being the starting middle hitter. I told my mom that I was not going to do Broadway Company. I did not want to be the same as my brother. Everyone was always comparing me to him. Towards the end of freshman year, my mom sat down with me and gave me a lecture on me going out for Broadway.
Needless to say she and two crazy choir teachers talked me into it. My rookie year I was too cool for this. I acted like I didn’t care and I pretended like I had no interest in singing.
I wasn’t one of these kids. I wasn’t like them. I wasn’t one of the weird ones. I was the cool Broadway guy and that’s how I wanted it to be.


After the first semester of my junior year, I started to come around. I didn’t care about what the kids thought of me. I wanted to sing. I love to sing and I wanted that lead part my senior year. Senior year quickly came around and we were undecided on what musical we were going to be performing. After much consideration, the choir teachers decided that we should perform cats as our musical. Wow! This was the worst news I could possibly hear. This would mean that I would have to, not only be a cat, but wear a unitard! If this would have been sophomore year, I probably would have said, “I quit.” I fought the teachers, but we were doing the musical no matter what my opinion was. I got over it and found that there actually is some really creative and interesting songs in this musical. We tried out for cats on July 27th. Anxiously waiting for the results of the tryouts, I stayed up all night to wake up in the morning a read the email sent by my choir teacher. It said, “Jon Tajnai-Munkustrap.” I got the lead!


I am currently working on Cats until our last show on the 21st of October. I will miss it so much when it is over. Broadway has taught me so much and I have grown up in these last couple of years. I respect people opinions and I am open- minded to everyone. I have learned to respect people when they are in charge and to listen to them when they are getting their point across. I can’t wait to go to college and hopefully pursue something with music and back it up with business.