It was a typical Sweet 16 1970s-theme party. Drama geeks in vintage bell-bottoms circled the rink at the Cherry Hill Skating Center in southern New Jersey, a disco ball spun overhead and a yellow sheet cake with chocolate frosting that read "Happy Birthday Claire" sat beneath balloons in the corner. Then someone made the inevitable call for a game of spin the bottle.
"Spin the bottle?" cried out Rose Luardo, a rail-thin guest in a platinum Afro wig, as she looked up from the Diet Coke she was sipping through a Twizzler. Will Christianson, 16, a tall boy in a patchwork sweater and a mop of blond highlights who was sitting beside her, laughed mockingly.
Luardo, after all, is 34 years old. And she had come to be among this sea of dewy-faced high-schoolers not as a chaperone or older sister, but because Will is her personal unpaid intern and, in her words, BFF, best friend forever. She met him when he came to see her band play in Philadelphia last winter. They subsequently got to know each other through MySpace and instant messaging, and when Luardo needed to channel the voice of a teenager for a marketing project, she enlisted Will's help.
PHOTO: NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
Since then he has been her point man for keeping up with all things young. In turn she has been spending many a weekend shuttling him from his home in Moorestown, New Jersey, to parties, concerts and the occasional summer blockbuster.
At one time, there was no way to better broadcast one's failure to thrive as an adult than to hang around high school kids. It meant that the world beyond senior prom had shut its doors, forcing a return to a place in which your value was determined solely by your ability to drive a car and procure beer.
But now, according to young professionals working in fields in which fluency in the dialects and habits of teenagers is paramount, hanging out with high-schoolers is cool, and sometimes even professionally advantageous.
Often these teenagers are known as "the intern." They are working for little or nothing at clothing labels, guerrilla marketing firms and one-person event planning operations, making coffee, opening mail and tagging along with their employers in environments they deem interesting. While they get college-resume-boosting work experience, not to mention entree into clubs and parties, their employers get round-the-clock muses and ambassadors to youth culture.
"I don't need to look at the Internet anymore, I just look these kids straight in the eyes and they tell me everything I need to know," said Luardo, a former buyer for Urban Outfitters who is now a musician, part-time sales representative and freelance marketer. A few weeks ago, Luardo, Will and one of his friends, Dot Goldberger, were eating enchiladas at a restaurant in Center City Philadelphia.
"Rose doesn't know anything about music," Dot said, as Will sneaked a sip of Luardo's blood orange margarita. Besides the fact that he likes hanging out with Rose, Will said he was glad to help her because it kept him busy and might look good on a college application.
Will's father, Allan Christianson, said he was just thankful that Luardo was willing to share the task of driving his son around.
"At first I thought, `Gee, she's a little older,"' Christianson said, "but a lot of people get old only because they think they are."
There is no way to quantify how many young professionals are employing high school students, but Mark Oldman, a founder and a co-president of Vault.com, a career-information Web site, said his firm estimates that the number of high school students doing internships has increased 30 percent in the past five years.
"It's one very potent way of diversifying your high school portfolio" on a college application, he said.
And Gina Neff, an assistant professor of communication at the University of Washington in Seattle who studies internships in communication industries, said that because small media, entertainment and arts companies often don't offer formal internship programs, high school students are filling informal roles in such businesses, especially because "they are locked out of traditional internship programs that offer credit for college." While some high schools offer course credit for internships or even require them, most don't.
To employers desperate for a hot line into the Clearasil demographic, the young interns offer both cheap labor and the frisson of authenticity.
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