Questions:

1. How is "The American Dream" presented here, and what comments are made on it?
2. What are the Problems with this dream?
3. How does the epigraph comment on Laura or the overall themes of the play?
4. With all this denial flying about the place, what are these three characters hiding from each other?
5.  What do they try to conceal from the audience, even? From themselves? How do their interactions with each other cause friction with respect to their hidden demons?
6. How does it work to have Tom both narrating the action and participating in the action? 
7. Do you trust him as a narrator? Does it change the way you see the play?
8. After speaking with Amanda, what does Tom agree to do for Laura?
   A. Buy her a new dress with his next paycheck.
   B. Take her to the Century of Progress.
   C. Build a shelf for her glass ornaments.
   D. Find her a suitable mate.
   9. What is Tom unable to leave behind?
   
   
   A. A glass shard
   B. Jim
   C. His sadness at leaving behind his mother
   D. His guilty memories of laura
   10. Tom states that in memory everything seems to happen to what?
   
   
   a) Music
   b) Fade in and out
   c) Be boring
   d) Be black and white
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   

David Blaine's Ted Talk was amazing. It really shows how far someone can go with hard work and motivation and maybe a little bit of insanity. It also reminded me that what all these Ted Talks share is a person you loves what they do--I really hope I can pursue something I love as a career too.

Ten Tips to Save Time
Ugh what a waste of time I couldn't even finish watching this I got so annoyed.

Steve Jobs had three stories with the underlying theme of doing what you love and making the most of your time. This really affected me because recently I have been tired of and uninterested in some of my classes (cough, cough APHG, cough, cough, trig) that I spend the bulk of my time on. If I was going to die tomorrow, would I read 30 pages about the history of agriculture? Or where copper is situated on the planet? No! Which is why I should probably switch my schedule for next year so I don't take another AP social science.

The Great Gatsby was Great
If you ask how it was, most people will say "eh", but I really enjoyed the Great Gatsby movie. It had a great soundtrack--it wasn't 20s style but it seemed to incorporate the audience with popular music--and I felt like it captured the characters and themes the book. I thought they did an especially good job with Nick and Daisy. The reason I would give it a 4/5 rather than 5/5 is that they did a pathetic job with the deaths and they were a little over the top with the green screen and computerized watchamacallit.

6/21/2030
Ruth Evans
Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology for creating the first clone

Before I begin, I would like to thank my community, for all of the support--the neighbors and the  book store salespeople, the authors and the designers, the professors and the college students in my neighborhood. I also want to thank all of you for your acceptance and approval, despite my shady past.

I was 16 when my mother died, I was devastated. The only thing I had left of her was a sample of her DNA. But I turned that devastation into resolve. I would bring her back. I would make her come back to me. I spent years reading books on taxidermy and obsessing over the specifics of cloning. Sneaking into labs and cloning scared rats and unsuspecting squirells . It took me years to perfect this skill. Tens of years to find the little cinks, the problems that killed instead of cloned. All that time I had to dodge the naive anti-cloning laws...slipping from one lab to another when people started to suspect.

Finally I felt that his would work. I made an arrangement to fly out to a small island, deserted and unknown to most of humanity. I found implanted my mothers DNA into my womb and the rest is history.

I’ve raised her as my daughter, hoping she would become my mother. Hoping someday she would cradle my head in her lap and tell me she loved me like she used to. Too late,I realized that with all my hard work, my ideal destination would never come true. My mother’s DNA could never bring back my mother. Fraternal twins have the same DNA--but are their souls the same? Their minds the same? No.

All my mother’s DNA is at this point iis a spoiled teen. Do you think you would get a pacifist if you cloned Gandhi? A dictator if you cloned Hitler? No!

Don’t get me wrong, though. We have use of cloning.While the minds of two people with the same DNA may grow different, they could physically be very similar.  Imagine creating a cloned army, using the DNA of the strongest and strategic people? Or Genetically altering them to be stronger? Cloning people with the best IQs, and sure, they’ll act different than the people they are cloned of, but they may still give us great leads in the sciences. Imagine building a country or even a world with the most perfect, amazing, diverse people? Imagine making further breakthroughs in the art of cloning and genetically engineering.This could be the future of the United States of America! This could lead to world domination!

Will you take part in this? Will you join with me to build a new, modern world? Or will you hide, paranoid, afraid of what the future will hold? Clones are no different from twins, so how can it be wrong? And especially people who live short lives deserve a second chance to make a mark--with their DNA.

(Applause)

Thank you! Thank you! Thank you very much!

I’m now cloning for 19.99, contact me if you are interested!