To pick a favorite

This is actually a very difficult task. I have never once taken a class where I thoroughly, sincerely enjoyed everything we read (perhaps “enjoy” is too strong a term for Kingdom of this World). But I think my favorite was watching the documentary “Tocar y Luchar” about the orchestra programs in Venezuela. I am a music minor, and find it hard to articulate why I love music, but this movie did it wonderfully! As I was watching it, I had a Word document up, and would constantly pause the movie to type a cool quote. I struggled finding the best one for the blog post. But here were some of the other quotes that might illuminate why this was my favorite:

“Whoever creates music… begins to understand from within what essential harmony is… human harmony”

“Only music can communicate with human beings … that revelation is what transforms, is sublime and develops from within the spirit of man…”

“I imagine that God must like music, because something so beautiful can only be the work of God”

“Art implies a sense of perfection.. therefore of excellence, a road to excellence. ..a sense of harmony, order, rhythm, a sense of the aesthetic, the beautiful, the universal, and the language of the invisible”

“Is rhythm a musical phenomenon? No. Rhythm is a spiritual phenomenon. It is the internal pulse of the soul. Music sublimates the interior pulse of the soul and expresses it in a harmonious way. Subtly, invisibly, and transmitted, without words, to other human beings. It is the art of making will, souls, and spirits agree to generate a message, and to generate vaules that profoundly transforms the spirit of the child who makes the orchestra. … people feel a revelation. God reveals something ineffable. Something that cannot be penetrated by rationality; that is only penetrable by intuition. It is that a young person … challenged by the musical impulse and the tasks of the orchestra, begins a psychological transformation”

“We must let ourselves be invaded by that art that brings us together through music, plastic arts, literature, cinema, and begin to recognize ourselves in our essence, in our identity through art, which is the only world where we can find the true revelation of our being, the authentic being is revealed through art”

To all the artists out there: to all of you musicians, writers, filmmakers, and humanities majors; you’re doing good work for humanity. Keep it up. 

I hate you but I love you more!

In this scene from the movie La Misma Luna, Carlitos and Enrique obviously have some heated feelings toward each other. In our class my professor Dr. Mack related this scene to John Bolby’s attachment theory, and how when people fight, it is actually (often) attachment-seeking behavior. Seems slightly counter-intuitive right?  That in battling against, one is actually trying to become close. 

Why is that?

So many famous scenes of fantastically heated arguments turning into passionate kisses, right?! (The Notebook, in the rain; Mr. and Mrs. Smith, as they're blowing up their house; who could forget the Single's Ward, in the kitchen) Gosh darn, they’re entertaining! (and I wanted to post more, but some get a little inappropriate, and I don't know how to cut youtube videos) 

So one of the classics, just to get the idea (from Cheers):

or if you're a disney channel fan: 

What is it about passion that brings people together?

A friend of mine is taking a psychology class online. He told me in this lecture, his professor said that if a married couple never fought, there was probably something really wrong. If neither party had enough belief or care in his or her own opinion to disagree, they will wander through life together, but ultimately wander apart. But marriages that fight, and then make up, are actually closer. They care enough about the situation/other person to get emotional, to become unrestrained, and to want to fight for it.

I think this is my theory: If someone doesn’t care, if they are completely apathetic, they won’t take the time/energy to argue with you. So it’s subconsciously comforting to us when we’re throwing around heated words, because WORDS are being thrown around. Not silence.

You might think, “I’ve definitely argued with people when I didn’t care about them” Like group projects, perhaps? Me too. For sure. But even there—both parties have a strong feeling about how things should run. You both care about the project, and because of that—you’re linked together.

In “La Misma Luna,” It seems the more angry and annoyed Enrique gets at this little kid following him around, the more attached the two become. In the end, Enrique sacrifices himself in a big way, so Carlitos can have even the chance to find his mother. What a sweet attachment. 

well, owl be!

"The owl was my spirit, my bond to the time and harmony of the universe... My work was to do good" (Rudolfo Anaya, Bless Me, Ultima. p, 260)

In this book, the character Ultima is a seemingly omniscient figure. An older woman who has all the answers, but is full of mystery herself.  Her soul is intricately connected to an owl, a symbol of wisdom and power. Another famous character symbolized by an owl is the Greek goddess Athena.

This character is repeated throughout history, so there must be something about this type of character that we are drawn to.

Athena is the goddess of wisdom. She is also associated with War, but she’s not the goddess of WAR, she is the goddess of JUST warfare. She is specifically a woman who only wages justified wars using intelligence. Athena is often depicted in ancient art with an owl nearby, or as an owl.

For the ancient Greeks, war and wisdom are interlinked. The two should not be separate. A leader in deciding the fate of other men should be incredibly wise, perhaps above all else. Both Athena and Ultima are these leaders.

These two women are linked by the way they use their power: Ultima wages a just war against a curse, against evil.  She defends Antonio’s family with sagacity, after they plead, just like Athena would use her powers for a good hero who called upon her for help.

These two characters are from wildly different cultures, across hundreds of years in time, and geographical locations, and yet repeated.  Something about the human spirit wants to connect to a character of perfect wisdom. We yearn for relatable, human characters on whom we can call rely for answers. There is a desperate desire, a hope, and maybe even a faith that our leaders be infinitely wiser than we. We make decisions based on our knowledge—which we know is limited and flawed—and maybe that scares us.

Both these women are powerful and strong, not because of their physical strength, but because of their wisdom. They use their knowledge to justly resolve conflict. What better characters to place our trust in to lead us at the forefront?

Magic Beyond Religion

“So I must work the magic beyond evil, the magic that endures forever” (Rudolfo Anaya, Bless Me, Ultima p. 94).

In this novel, Antonio is searching for answers between two religious mediums: devout Catholicism and a mysterious pagan-like power. His mother is strictly, piously Christian, and his La Grande, Ultima, is something else entirely, but she obviously has a strong power.

A friend of mine once told me that people created religion because it is comforting. (i.e., once we die, there is something more; there is someone more powerful than we are, who’s actually in charge, and He has a plan. And He’s on our side… etc. comforting notions right?) His theory was that man made up religion for his own peace of mind. I agree on some level, but for different reasons. I think there is divinity in this world, and we organize ourselves with beliefs so we can try to wrap our brains around the things we cannot fully comprehend.

It’s Jaques Lacan’s theory of the real and the symbolic order: we order our world of chaos and emotion with language and symbols. So with regard to religion—we give boundaries, laws, rules, and structure to try and grasp the ineffable reality of truth.

Ultima works outside of these boundaries: she works beyond “good vs. evil” beyond “black and white” beyond “Christian vs. Pagan” - she uses magic beyond any of these.

I took a world religions class (at my Catholic high school) and we visited a Buddhist temple. I distinctly remember not understanding a word the small old man was saying. But I also remember feeling something very powerful in this service. The incense and the atmosphere were entrancing. Even though it was very far from my own Christian beliefs, there was something tangibly…otherworldly. In a good way.

I truly believe that my church was founded by God Himself. But I also have no doubt that there is truth and divinity outside  my church’s doctrine.

Maybe God gave us confines so that we can wrap our brains around a tiny piece of the universe? Maybe we really couldn’t handle every truth without some sort of structure curtailing it slightly. Maybe one day we’ll know it all—and we won’t need “religion.”

Deal with the Devil

“For man always seeks a happiness far beyond that which is meted out to him.  But man's greatness consists in the very fact of wanting to be better than he is” (Alejo Carpentier, “Kingdom of this World” p. 179).

The characters in this novel go through awful difficulties. They live through a revolution where some are tortured, tossed aside, and eventually turned back over to slavery.  This book of incoherency and complete lack of structure, ends with a long paragraph of entirely lucid brilliance.  After experiencing this mad, upside-down, reversed, jumbled world, the author wanted the readers to know that through all the nonsensical aspects of life, you have to keep going, you have to keep progressing.

There is a German legend where a man named Dr. Faust makes a deal with the devil. There are many different versions of the legend (but the one my Classics professor likes is Goethe’s rendition). In the story, Faust exchanges his soul for unlimited knowledge and pleasure of the world. The deal is, as soon as Faust says (something to the effect of) “I could stay in this moment forever” then the devil gets his soul. So the devil gives Faust everything he could possibly want, in hopes that in any given moment, Faust won’t want to change his circumstances.  But Faust never says it. In the ending twist, Faust describes a time in the future where he is constantly changing. And says, “I could stay in that moment forever,” the moment of constant striving, moving, progressing, is where he could stay.

Different versions have different endings, but here, Faust tricks the devil and with a little help from God, Faust is saved from hell because of his desire for an unchanging state of always changing.

In the words of one of my favorite hymns, If You Could Hie to Kolob:

The works of God continue, and worlds and lives abound;

Improvement and progression have one eternal round…

There is no end to wisdom

There is no end to light…

There is no end to truth

There’s something innately necessary about progression. Maybe Faust or Carpentier are trying to say that somehow we’ll be protected from the devil if we keep moving forward?

But stagnancy is not an option.

something about the beat

(Marc Anthony "Valio La Pena") 

When you were listening, could you sit still?!

Neither could I!

There’s something about this music that just makes you want to move your body, right?!

Talking about music is like dancing about architecture (ie very difficult to describe) but there’s obviously something powerful here that should be acknowledged.

Let’s compare this to a minuet, or a waltz:

It might make you sway a little. (Or maybe, as I found myself doing, make you conduct an invisible orchestra.) But it doesn’t instill the same instinctual pulse, the same carnal desire to move to the beat as that salsa number.

I recently attended an open forum where Dr. Paul Kerry led a discussion on how our (U.S.) society of courtship and dancing has disintegrated from the controlled, statuesque technique of European ballroom, into the base, carnal, sexual movement of our modern social dance (mostly through rock and roll).

In the book “The Closing of the American Mind” by Allan Bloom, the author says that Music is the medium of the human soul. He says, “Music is the soul’s primitive and primary speech and it is without articulate speech or reason…. Even when articulate speech is added, it is utterly subordinate to and determined by the music and the passions it expresses” (71)* So how you use this very powerful medium, hits something in the very soul. 

Dr. Kerry’s theory was that the change came in the percussion. He said there’s something about a drumbeat that innately drives the listener to move their hips. This, of course makes the dance more sexual. But I think it’s more than just the drums. It’s the rhythm—the syncopation, the pulse…

So should everything with a beat be banned from a wholesome campus such as BYU? To prevent urges to break the honor code…? Maybe.

Because obviously there’s something so powerful about this force that needs to be acknowledged.  Something human about this release of tension, this thrust into a world with no rules, with just passion, emotion, and desire: maybe it puts people in Lacan’s realm of the REAL. 

Listen to that song again, just try to stand still. I swear it’s impossible.

*I only have a copy of the chapter, not the citations for the book, but if you wanted to find it, the quote is found in the chapter entitled “music”

Eve and Existence

“…he could expect nothing from those pupils who accepted his doctrine passively, but that he could expect something from those who occasionally dared to oppose him. The former group… could not ascend to the level of individuals” (Jorge Luis Borges, “The Circular Ruins” 58-59).

This story shows a man who dreams up the existence of another man. With meticulously careful constructing, he finally makes one worthy enough for existence (even if it’s only in his dreams). But he cannot bring to “life” a being that is passive, or completely obedient. Only in doing something original, different than the generation before us, can we progress, move forward into a stage of being an individual. 

Back to the very beginning of human history: Adam and Eve could not live in a state of ignorance forever. They obeyed every word of doctrine that was given to them. The moment that they disobeyed the authority before them, is where their story—and human history—begins. They needed to eat the fruit that gave them a knowledge of good and evil, of opposition. They needed this perfection to be challenged; without it, they would not have been able to produce life themselves.

Before their “fall,” the world lived in a perfect state, but it was never progressing. Nothing could die, but nothing could become. 

Scriptures tell us that God said, “For it must needs be, that there is an opposition in all things. If not so…righteousness could not be brought to pass, neither wickedness, neither holiness nor misery, neither good nor bad… wherefore, if it should be one body it must needs remain as dead, having no life neither death, nor corruption nor incorruption, happiness nor misery, neither sense nor insensibility” (2 Nephi 2:11).

I don’t think one needs to completely disregard every order or every teaching. You just need to be able to question. To “ascend to the level of an individual,” you need to fight for the real truth, for the best answer, for the knowledge of your own.

I wonder if I fight enough for the right to exist. 

into the real!

“The fiesta is a revolution in the most literal sense of the word. In the confusion that it generates, society is dissolved… Everything merges, loses shape and individuality and returns to the primordial mass” (51).

Our daily lives are incredibly structured. Everyone has a schedule, meetings, and customary gracious courtesies attached to the culture of their society.

Paz claims that fiestas shove people out of their controlled lives and plunges them into a chaotic world, where time is transformed, and people can just live.

Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan had a theory about psychic structures: that most of our lives we live within a structured, “symbolic order,” where everything has a name and a contained meaning. But sometimes, we are thrown into the realm of “The Real.” A world of pure emotion, senses, desire, etc. A world that resists symbolism; it’s just real experience. And in being thrown into such an ineffable state of being allows us to reorder our ordered world—so it is important that we do so.

This idea of acknowledging ourselves in the realm of the real isn’t new. In ancient Greek mythology, the god Dionysus represents irrationality and “liminal abandon,” or the lifting of inhibitions; in other words, “the real.”

The ancient Greeks thought this was as necessary as Paz and Lacan did. In the play “The Bacchae” by Euripides, the king of Thebes (Pentheus) prohibits worship of the god Dionysus. Pentheus is subsequently murdered by his mother. In the eyes of the Greeks, Pentheus’ death was actually justified, because he represents the rejection of all irrationality. But man needs to acknowledge the illogical side of himself. By prohibiting worship of Dionysus, Pentheus is symbolically banning the whole city from that escape into the Real. He is barring his people from experiencing the kind of world that Paz is talking about in the fiesta: the chaotic world of “thwarted impulses… (that) we hide within ourselves in our daily lives” (Paz, 53).

There is something necessary about the ability to just be, to live in a world with no structure, because it momentarily allows us to be free. When you scream, or you cry, or you kiss, or you mourn, or party (with either Paz or Dionysus), you deal with that aspect of your humanity that you otherwise cannot in our culture of control.

Art and Community

An orchestra is a community …that comes together with the fundamental objective of agreeing with itself…therefore the person who plays in an orchestra begins to experience agreement… the practice of the group that recognizes itself as interdependent, where everyone is responsible for others and the others are responsible for oneself. (Documentary Tocar y Luchar, around minute11:17)

In Venezuela, a new movement has emerged: a huge cultural push toward music education for the children. Thirty years after the initiative first began, there is now a community of musicians, and a community that wildly supports their children becoming musicians. This mastery and focus has lifted many communities in Venezuela. These people have come together and through art created true beauty, a sense of accomplishment and worth, significance and contribution in a group of people that might not have otherwise felt.

I am studying music, theater and the humanities, and I truly believe that collaborative arts can bring people together in a way that nothing else can. Think of your study groups; competitive math doesn’t lead to deep emotional bonds. A mere education of dates and formulas cannot link people together in such an emotional state as can art.

Romeo to my Juliet. Picture published in the Daily Universe

This is not as drastic a story as the documentary, but the same idea holds. Last year, in a college English class, we were allowed to choose our final projects. I produced a mini-Shakespeare play. My cast of 6 and I didn’t know each other's names, we were all completely different majors, and had nothing in common besides the fact that we were stuck in this GE. But through the process of brainstorming, writing, blocking, and acting, they became my best friends that semester. It was an interesting phenomenon. I took more pride in the rest of my schoolwork, because I was so proud of our little show.

That was a small example. I’ve probably been in over 100 shows in my lifetime (including concerts, musicals, etc), and every time it’s the same effect. I can see the blessings of teamwork, and trust. You rely on your fellow artists, and they rely on you.

A community should be based on the kinds of ideals that collaborative art generates: teamwork, responsibility, and trust. And through art, many times a community like that arises.

Masks and Humanity

“It was grotesque, this mask! But a humane social order is not always achieved without the grotesque, and sometimes not without the cruel… But let us not concern ourselves with masks.” Machado de Assis, Father versus Mother, 89

(this does not fit Machado's description exactly,
but it gives you an idea of the cruelty)

After taking a large paragraph to describe these masks chained onto runaway slaves, Machado de Assis casually says, "let us not concern ourselves with masks."

I think that is exactly what he would like us to concern ourselves with.

The French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas had the idea that if we truly saw the infinite aspects of that person—then we would not have the capacity to willingly do them harm. But when we put a finite label on them, take away the face-to-face, put on masks, their humanity disappears, and we can justify hurting them.

This reminded me of the way propaganda historically has shown the enemy in war as monsters. Look at the way World War II had a continuous propaganda stream objectifying the Japanese people, turning them into daemons.  

 

In Machado de Assis’ story, Candinho catches runaway slaves for a profession, if you can call it that. How do we catch, bind, or beat another human?

How do you allow young men to attack a generation of Japanese?

We must make them inhuman with a mask.

Even though these slaves in the story are not always wearing the physical metal mask Machado de Assis describes, they have a label, the mask of “runaway slave.”  For Candinho, when the slave plead for the safety of her unborn child, he saw her only as “money.” When we went to kill thousands of Japanese, they were simply, “Japs”

The Japanese were fighting parallel to us. They had allies, land, and a way of life to defend. We didn’t sympathize, we labeled them, in order to have our young boys kill them.

With such a parallel to Candinho’s own situation—the potential loss of a child looming ahead— there should be a large case for sympathy on his part. But because the woman is no longer human in his eyes, “He did not give a hang about the miscarriage.”

Is it an unavoidable aspect of human nature to label? Is there a way we can look at our enemy with true humanity? Could they still be our enemies if we do?

Utter Defeat

Juan Manuel Blanes "Paraguay: Image of Your Desolate Country"  c. 1880

This painting is in reference to a war in Paraguay fought between 1864-1870, called the War of Triple Alliance. This war was a struggle for physical power over boundary lines; and occurred in the midst of a nationalist movement, when the South American Spanish and Portuguese colonies were attempting to gain their own identities. It was proportionally the most destructive war in modern history; more than 60% of the Paraguayan population was wiped out. This painting shows the desolation of a fallen people after battle.

In the background, as you face the painting to the right, there is a dead man in the distance hanging on the ledge. His arms draped unromantically sideways and above his head. This figure looks very similar to an iconic image in the musical “Les Miserables”: The picture of the leader of the revolution, Enjolras, after he is killed, and his body is upside-down, arms stretched out above his head, splayed across the very barricade he gave his life to defend. The story of Enjolras in Les Mis is similar to the Paraguayan fight. The small Parisian insurrection that took place in 1832, where there were street riots and resistance for a couple of days, ended up being destructive and essentially useless. They accomplished next to nothing, except devastation.

In both images there is also a pseudo crucifix representation. But with the important alteration of being upside-down. The fact that this martyr figure -- this revolutionary -- fighting for beliefs, is lying dead, with his head toward the ground.  His head isn’t even upright, facing the heavens; there is a total lack of hope for redemption or resurrection

Both images of dead men upside-down on the ground he was defending, are so powerful. I think it is repeated because of the feeling it imposes on an audience: complete and utter defeat. There is a kind of sensation of absolute despair. Revolutionary men fighting for identity, country, and self -- and losing, with no hope at all.

the heart is like a box

"Nuestra Senora del Socorro... made me see that the heart is like a box; if it is filled with rubbish, there is no space for other things" (Allende, 261).

When Ines is tyring to sort out her feelings for her former companion, Pedro, who truly betrayed her, she prays a lot. She prays in an attempt to find peace with her understandably angry feelings toward Pedro. And the answer she receives is that she cannot love her new husband and his daughter if her “heart was choked with bitterness.” If our lives are full of all the unpleasantness we hold on to, there is no space for the wonderful things that come our way.

This idea reminded me of a lesson I learned as a kid in Sunday school. It is kind of a silly example, but it helped me visualize the concept. You start with a jar. Next to the jar you have a large rocks, pebbles, sand, and a cup of water (all enough to individually fill the jar). So first, you fill up the jar with the big rocks until it’s full. Then add the pebbles, and let them settle, and then add the sand, then the water, until literally every bit of the jar that could be full, is.

The object lesson in that case was to fill your days with meaningful things first, and you will then still have time to do the fun little things. If you fill your whole jar with sand first, there will be no room for the big rocks.

I think this can apply to how we spend our time, to how we fill our minds, to the things we hold near and close to our hearts. If we dwell on the bitterness and heartbreak of the past, those are the big rocks that can occupy a lot of space, where we could let something else in. It was not easy of Ines, but it was very wise of her to take out those big rocks of scars, anger, and pain so quickly, and allow room for her love for her future family to take up room in her heart. As it would be wise of us all to leave space for lovely things to come. 

"Nothing Changes"

“Nothing changes; we humans repeat the same sins over and over, eternally” (Isabel Allende, Ines of my Soul, 245).

In this story of Spanish conquistadors, there is a seemingly endless cycle of violent skirmishes. Spaniards with a mindset of conquering lands pitted in war against indigenous people, set on protecting the land they have had for generations against intruders. In this novel, one chapter after another, flies by with battle after brutal battle. Each clash more gruesome than the last, and yet all very similar in destruction and pain. On top of a pattern of violence, there are other ‘sins’ that have reoccurred within this tale. Power, lust, jealousy, and ignorance all occur over and over.  As Ines puts it, historically humans have repeated the same sins over and over. I think it is human nature, on both a grand scale, and also within every one of us.

From 1095 to 1291, the crusades killed millions upon millions of people. Two-hundred years later, the Catholic church repeated the atrocity. With full knowledge of the last massacres, they fought again, for more-or-less the same reason. The Inquisition destroyed somewhere between 150,000-200,000 souls.

Pride in military strategy has been repeated. One example (which is widely over-simplified for the sake of demonstration) is when Napoleon launched the French invasion of Russia, and failed miserably in 1812 because of Russia’s size and endlessly harsh winters. Then one hundred years later, Hitler, with pride thought his armies could take on Russia more competently than Napoleon’s attempt, and failed in almost exactly the same way.

On the smallest of scales, this is sort of a silly example, but one that works: I gossip about the same people who annoy me, even after I repent about gossiping. I have often said the same lie, in order to protect the same stupid error, that I have made in the same stupid context, again.

Within our own everyday life, and for the history of mankind, the hope is that we learn from our mistakes, but human nature seems to condemn us to repeat ourselves. As Ines gravely says, “Nothing changes,” I’d have to agree sometimes. 

Stories and Time

"In theatrical performances...ordinary time ceases to operate and is replaced by original time...(mythical time) coincides with our inner, subjective time... (time) has ceased to be a spatial measurement and has changed into a source, a spring, in the absolute present... Therefore myth--disguised, obscure, hidden--reappears in almost all our acts and intervenes decisively in our history." (Paz, 211)

Paz talks about how our time as natural beings is skewed as soon as we put a label on it. As soon as we divide it into “yesterday, today, and tomorrow, into hours, minutes and seconds” (209), man is disconnected from the reality of the flow of time. So we look for small ways to realign ourselves with the subjective time flow, and relinquish the captive idea of time passing, and enjoy the moment for itself. Over human history we have discovered myths and theater as ways to pull ourselves into that subjective time zone.

I’m in a Greek and Roman Mythology class, and one quote I really loved from my reading packet says, "The range of myths is as wide as the world, being coextensive with the curiosity and the ignorance of man."

Me and a cast member in an elementary school

I think that there is a human fascination with stories. We need explanations, and we seek them, and sometimes find them, through stories.  My whole life, I have lived in the theater world. I grew up learning how to tell stories and depict characters. And through my experiences I have learned how much people enjoy leaving the structured realm of their own life, and escape into a placeless, nameless, and timeless reality that is the story they are watching. This last semester I toured with the BYU Young Company Production of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” We did the show over 40 times in the semester, but every single time it was so fun to delve into another world. A world set in New England in the 1800s, but took place in elementary school gyms in the 2000s; a world where 10 different people spoke, with only two actors’ mouths; a world that spanned half a year, in a mere 45 minutes. It was amazing to watch people leave behind their chronologically-centered world, and simply enjoy the time and space of our world in Sleepy Hollow.

I believe it is so clear that theater, myths, and just stories in general can transcend the boundaries of linear time.

Introduction

blog blog blog blog bloggity blog blog... that's one of those words if you say enough times, it starts sounding funny. and weird: blogblogblog.

Here's my blog! 

I have had experience writing a blog for a class before. At first, I thought my teacher was insane. I thought he was a crazy old man trying to make shakespeare fun for the new generation by making us write our essays via the internet. But I quickly became a fan of the idea, and am excited again to use it. The first class even prompted me to start my own blog for my own awkward life outside of academia. (Scripted Spontaneity, in case you ever want to read some embarrassing moments of mine, I've enjoyed publishing them for the world to see).

My name is Averill. I'm from Denver, Colorado. (I'm actually from Centennial, but no one's ever heard of that, so I say I'm from Denver.) I'm a junior at BYU. Currently majoring in Humanities with an emphasis in Theater, and minoring in Music. 

My passion is musical theater. I have lived a life full of cheesy costumes, tap shoes, corny songs, and ridiculously unrealistic over-the-top love stories. And I've loved every minute of my fantasy lives on stage. 

I took this class because A) I need it for my major, but also B) because it came HIGHLY recommended by a friend of mine who took it last semester. So I have VERY high expectations!