Saturday’s Save Ferris gig at Garden Amp will literally be a hometown show for the ska-pop-punk band’s frontwoman, Monique Powell, who attended Barker Elementary, Hilton D. Bell Intermediate and Pacifica High schools in Garden Grove.
Powell did wind up finishing high school in 1993 on the campus of Los Alamitos High School, where she attended Orange County High School of the Arts. But it was Pacifica High School that got a shout out from Powell … of sorts … in the middle of the Save Ferris show at OC Brew Ska Ska on Sept. 7 at Oak Canyon Park.
During some in between-song banter, Powell mentioned to the crowd that her alma mater had been in the news the month before. That was for video that had surfaced of Pacifica High students raising their arms in “Heil Hitler” salutes and singing a Nazi-era song. The footage had actually been captured in November of 2018, but its spread online in August sparked death threats against students on campus and a Garden Grove Unified School District investigation.
Now, to be clear, Powell was not down with the students’ actions, considering she also informed the audience that she is Jewish. Not did she damn anyone; her attitude was more along the lines of “Wassup with kids these days?”
Hey, maybe she’ll bring it up again when she’s really back home.
Save Ferris & The Bombpops at Garden Amp, 12762 Main St., Garden Grove, (949) 415-8544; gardenamp.com. Sat., 7 p.m. $20.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.