Stacy Conradt
The Quick 10: 10 Real-Life Glee Club Members
by Stacy Conradt - January 12, 2010 - 3:37 PM

q10

I’m a total Gleek, I admit it. I can’t sing to save my life, but it doesn’t stop me from singing show tunes at the top of my lungs on the way to work in the morning along with the Glee cast. Despite Glee’s depiction of the school songbirds as being total outcasts and losers, some of their real-life counterparts have been quite successful later in life. Here are 10 of them.

WILSON1. Woodrow Wilson. He was in the famous Virginia Glee Club when he attended UVA, studying law.
2. Leonard Bernstein, Harvard Glee Club.
3. Dr. Sanjay Gupta, University of Michigan Men’s Glee Club
4. Thomas Dewey, the famous presidential also-ran, was also in the UM Men’s Glee Club.
5. Cole Porter, Yale Glee Club. Incidentally, Porter wrote more than 300 songs while he was at Yale.
6. Theodore Roosevelt, Harvard Glee Club.
7. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harvard Glee Club.
8. Ashton Kutcher, show choir, Clear Creek-Amana High School.
blake9. Blake Lively was a member of In Sync – and no, that’s not a typo. In Sync was the name of the show choir at Burbank High School.
10. Glenn Close was a member of Up With People.

Do you know of any others? Or were you in glee club or show choir? Like I said, I have a terrible voice, so I never even tried. Although I might adore Glee now, in real life I was more of a band geek.

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Comments (12)

  1. I too was a member of Up With People….don’t think I’d ever thought about it as a Glee Club before. But, it does make some sense!

    posted by Heather on 1-12-2010 at 4:13 pm

  2. My grandma was in the glee club with Andy Griffith at UNC!

    posted by Amanda on 1-12-2010 at 4:28 pm

  3. I was in regular ordinary Chorus all three yrs of High School…

    The one thing that always annoys me about GLEE is how they keep beating into viewers heads’ the notion that, as Stacy perfectly states, the members are ” total outcasts and losers”

    Well, I certainly wasn’t ‘Miss Popularity’, but I don’t think any members of our group were treated with as much disdain as this lot is by fellow students and staff alike.

    And would it kill them to use more SHOW TUNES? ‘Kurt’ once said that’s *all* they do, but – with a few exceptions – I don’t see that.

    Before I end this ‘rant’, one ‘positive’ – Rachel’s full-of herself attitude is DEAD ON, for someone I knew not in Chorus. but Theatre

    posted by Amy on 1-12-2010 at 5:25 pm

  4. Who on earth is Blake Lively?

    posted by Fruppi on 1-12-2010 at 6:13 pm

  5. @Fruppi – Blake Lively’s one of the leads on the CW’s Gossip Girl… and she did a mean impersonation of Elin Woods recently on Saturday Night Live.

    posted by Steve from San Diego on 1-12-2010 at 6:35 pm

  6. Anyone who watched the Sing Off before Christmas would be familiar with the Beelzebubs from Tufts University (love the Bubs!). Actor Peter Gallagher is a notable alum of the group.

    posted by C on 1-12-2010 at 6:59 pm

  7. As a former Virginia Glee Club member, I’m happy to see Woodrow Wilson at #1 on the list. Balancing the political scales, Antonin Scalia says he was in the glee club at Georgetown as an undergrad: http://www.wqxr.org/programs/mam/2010/jan/03/transcript/

    posted by Tim Jarrett on 1-12-2010 at 9:36 pm

  8. I was in my high school’s show choir for 3 years. Loved it! And it wasn’t a hodgepodge of losers and outsiders, so “Glee” annoys me there, too.

    Recaptcha: Report site. Uh-oh!

    posted by Krie on 1-12-2010 at 10:28 pm

  9. I was in choir in high school! I don’t watch “Glee”.

    posted by Sara in AL on 1-13-2010 at 12:12 am

  10. Just to clarify, on “Glee” the Glee club of today are outcasts and losers. They often talk about the Glee club of yore when Will Schuster was in school and they ruled the school. Also their big rival “Vocal Adrenaline” are quite popular filling up auditoriums for performances. It is just at this school at this time that Glee is full of losers. Not in the whole entire worl of glee.

    I guess that was my impression. I was never in Glee though, I was the captian of the Knowledge Bowl Team.

    posted by Brit on 1-13-2010 at 2:25 pm

  11. @Fruppi – your post made me very happy. Being a Gossip Girl should not make anyone famous, and I am very glad that it doesn’t to everyone

    posted by Sam on 1-13-2010 at 5:10 pm

  12. Bob McGrath from Sesame street was a member of the University of Michigan Men’s Glee Club, and my favorite is Jeff Marx, who co-wrote Avenue Q. He also sang with UMMGC during his college days. We also had several opera stars who stood on the Hill auditorium stage with “club” during their schooling at umich. If you want to hear what a true GLEE CLUB sounds like, go to “ummgc.org”.

    posted by Brandon on 3-2-2010 at 10:18 am

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