The author learned that the book "The Catcher in the Rye," so important to him as a young man, had been challenged by adults and could easily have been barred from his school's reading list. He started thinking about who had the power to tell him what he could and could not read as a teenager and as a high school student. What were the reasons the adults in his life might have wanted to keep certain books away from him? How far did their power extend? Although he was confronting these questions years after his high school experience, he wondered how he would have approached them from "the inside," as a student caught in the crossfire of adult battles over curriculum and the arts. As part of a drama teaching methods course, and an Arts Bridge scholarship through the Herberger College Community Partnerships Office at Arizona State University, the author had an opportunity to confront these questions while teaching a 10-week residency that integrated drama, language arts, and student research. His participants were 8th grade honors Language Arts students in the greater Phoenix metropolitan area. In this article, the author reflects on the political, aesthetic and pedagogical complexities of an 8th grade performance ethnography project about banned books.