Cross Currents Fall 2025 Alumni Feature Story: Anand Wilder, Class of 2000
I feel so lucky and privileged to have gone to Park for 13 years, from Kindergarten to twelfth grade. The sheer scope of the experience is so personality defining that it has been difficult for me to parse it into a short essay. But if I have to boil down the lasting impact that Park had on me, it’s how the exalted position of the performing arts within the culture of the school showed me that the arts were not only central to learning, but could also be a legitimate career path.
I started playing the cello at the age of four and a half before I came to Park; perhaps that helped me get admitted to the school. All I remember about the admissions process was that it included walking across a pretty tall leather balance beam. Easy peasy. My teachers, Hillary and Peter, were magical idealistic beings, with a wide ranging open-ended curriculum. I remember studying monarch butterflies and being shown how to use a magnifying glass to ignite dried up leaves, and being encouraged to keep a journal of how to spell tricky words (like “spaghetti”), something I still do to this day. For Show and Tell, they encouraged me to bring in my cello, and I would play Long, Long Ago, or Go Tell Aunt Rhody, Book 1 Suzuki classics.
I think I was still in Kindergarten when the Upper School Fall Musical was The Mystery of Edwin Drood. I can still picture the tall lanky Indian man (he was obviously an Upper School student, but to my fiveyear- old brain he was an adult actor) dressed in a suit, slinking out from stage right smoking a cigarette with a spotlight on him, convincingly embodying some important character. Maybe he was the narrator or the murderer, I don’t know, I’ve never seen the play ever since. But I was completely enraptured, and couldn’t wait to get on that stage.
Cello lessons and orchestra were a very specific kind of formal classical music training, but this was something different, more rebellious and edgy, more mature, and the Park School theater scene captured my imagination in a more intangible way than just reading bass clef notes. I continued with private lessons in classical music outside of school until graduation, but felt liberated at Park to experiment with all the performing arts options that were available.
And to my eye, the performing arts were central to the culture of the school as a whole, and were worthy of pursuing with serious dedication and commitment.
The hallway leading to the theater was a portal into past productions, lined with a tapestry of dramatic photos celebrating past performances going back to the 1970s, that I would stare at while waiting to be picked up after school. So much rich history, and I wanted to bring my unique skill set to this institution, for the glory sure, but also for the intense experience of stretching myself to memorize, perform, execute.
I was hooked on attending all the plays that I could, and made attempts at friendship with all the older students who were the stellar actors and singers. I’m still friends with Park students who are many years older than me, and who also pursued the arts as a career path, and we still rely on each other for mentorship and encouragement in the face of the ups and downs and financial irregularities of the professional arts career.
Aside from the plays, I treasured the more casual student-led events like Cabaret, where student rock bands and solo folksinger style artists could perform in a sort of Greenwich Village Coffeehouse open mic setting, with a comedic emcee providing off the cuff banter in between performances. Many of the students who performed at Cabaret went on to pursue music as a career, and I’m not surprised; these performances were passionate interpretations of pop music that loom large in my memory. The slightly competitive nature of the event made you give it your all, with esoteric choice of repertoire, and clever reinterpretation of classics. And when Cabaret wasn’t enough, some older students founded Goldsoundz, which emphasized longer sets of louder rock music by the many bands that were formed by students at the school.
It was preparing for these rock concert events that I applied to my work in my band Yeasayer, which I formed after college with a fellow Park classmate, and toured around the world with professionally from 2005 until 2019. In 2014, in the midst of the band’s career, I released an original rock opera entitled Break Line, inspired by my love of musical theater, which brought together the singing talents of many artists I had met on the road, and included some songs that I had written for my Park School band back in high school.
Since the band broke up, I’ve signed as a solo artist to a label called Last Gang records, continued to tour, and put out three full length albums of music, the latest of which is entitled Psychic Lessons, and is available on all streaming platforms. In spite of the difficulties all working artists have, I still persevere because of the undeniable feeling of personal fulfillment that comes with creative expression, and I credit Park for emphasizing and nurturing the arts throughout my time there.
Find the full Fall 2025 issue of Cross Currents here.
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