senior program summer site : conversations : first session



	monica from connecticut (7/16) Monica, an eleventh grader, is joins Explo for her first summer as a day student. She loves writing and editing, and is currently slightly obsessed with Bob Dylan. So tell me about your first course. My first course is screenplay writing, and it’s pretty cool because we get to watch a lot of clips from different movies and discuss like how the dialogue in them worked or didn’t work,. And then we do our own exercises. A couple of days ago we read a short story and then worked in groups to discuss how we would adapt it if we were to adapt it to a screenplay. What’s your favorite movie in or out of class? Well we just watch some short, very random clips in class . . . but my personal favorite movie is a three-way tie between Titanic, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, and Princess Mononoke. What attracts you to those movies? I think it’s because, like . . . well, Titanic is just a great story and it’s done really, really well . . . because it could be really clichéd otherwise, but they do it in such a good way you don’t feel it’s clichéd, even though the story is a little bit – well, it’s just so well acted. And the other two actually have a lot of really profound things to say, but they don’t really come across that way – because Princess Mononoke is actually a Hayao Miyazaki movie – it’s an anime – so you would think that it doesn’t have a lot to say, but it has a lot to say about war and respect for nature. And The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly has a lot to say about similar things, really, like war and the human costs of things. What about your second course? My second course is speech writing. We’ve done a lot of going through and trying to use more descriptive words, and we’re working on writing our final speeches now. What’s yours about? Mine is about the importance of learning other languages. The cliché thing for that is that it’s useful for the workforce, but I’m actually talking about how it’s useful for your own personal, like, cultural understanding. So you have screenwriting and speechwriting – are you leaning towards going to school for writing? Yeah, definitely! That or French . . . something like that. What attracts you to writing? I actually love editing. I love editing other people’s things, editing my own things . . . you know, if there’s a limit – you can only have 500 words and you have 600 – cutting out those extra words, paring it down 110 words or whatever, I really love doing that. And I love reading. And I just love to write in general. What’s your favorite book? Probably The Great Gatsby. The story in and of itself is really enjoyable, because it’s pretty much like a soap opera. It’s a lot of fun. But it’s also really lyrically written. Like, if you take any one of those sentences out and just give it to someone on a blank piece of paper and say, “Here’s a sentence, what do you think of it?” most people are going to say, “That is an amazing sentence!” It’s just so well written. And, also, it has a lot to say about the American Dream and how we can start living too much, and it’s really interesting. What about the mini-course that you just finished? I just finished “Got Human Rights?” It was interesting. We talked about UN charters, about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Charter on the Right of the Child and stuff . . . we learned that anyone under the age of 18 has a right to play. Pretty awesome. Wow, that’s a pretty good right. What about your second mini-course? I’m in “Social Movements”. I really like it. Today we talked about the "One" campaign, “End Poverty”, and the “Product Red” thing . . . and before we’ve talked about all kinds of different things from a group dedicated to stopping standardized testing to PETA, so it’s just been a lot of interesting things. And we learned about the logistics of social movements, like the different steps that they go through – from where they just start off as an idea to where they start gathering momentum to where they eventually die out, whether it’s because they don’t succeed in the first place or because they reach their goal and then they don’t need to exist anymore. Have you ever been part of a social movement before? I don’t believe I have, I have to admit. [Laughs.] Do you have a favorite main event so far? The hypnotist was pretty good. Club night was fun. It was cool to go to Toad’s because I’ve never actually been there before. It was great to see all the different famous people staring down at us – there was one point where we had three Bob Dylans all surrounding us, it was cool. What’s that about? Oh, they have the paintings up on the wall of all the famous people who’ve performed there, it’s pretty cool. Who’s your favorite performer? I’m kind of in a Bob Dylan phase right now. But my friend just burned me a CD of all this great alternative pop-rock stuff that she loves, and I think it’s really fun too . . . so I don’t know. What’s your favorite Bob Dylan song? Right now it’s probably “Subterranean Homesick Blues”. It’s pretty awesome. Is there something you’re looking forward to most this coming week? I’m looking forward to actually writing a real screenplay, I’ve got one started right now. It’s basically about these two people who meet and how they’re both the same kind of people but one tries to hide it and the other doesn’t, and just how they interact. What trips have you gone on? I went to go see Chicago, which I loved – I think that’s my favorite one. I like jazz music, so I absolutely adored the music. It was fantastic. Then I went to Chinatown. Then we went to Madame Tusseaud’s and the movie tour. I got a picture of myself with F. Scott Fitzgerald and David Wright. I love David Wright! And the movie tour was kind of fun . . . you go around and they tell you, “Oh, they filmed this part of . . .” . . . Actually a lot of it was Seinfeld. They’re, like, “They filmed this part of Seinfeld here.” It was on a double-decker bus, and we all sat on top. And I went to Tanglewood to go hear the Boston Symphony Orchestra. I don’t really listen to classical a lot, but I enjoy it because I play two instruments, so it was cool to hear people who were that good out in that space. It facilitated a lot of thinking – I got a lot of thinking done. What advice would you give someone coming to Explo for the first time? I’d definitely say be really open minded and walk up to as many people as you can within the first week and say, “Hi, what’s your name, where are you from, I’m so-and-so,” and just try and get conversations going with as many different people as you can, because that’s the best thing you can do. What will you miss most? Definitely all the people I’ve met, because I’ve met some awesome people who live in random places, so it’ll be hard to communicate. What types of places? Texas, Florida, Colombia . . . pretty far spread. If you were a kitchen appliance, what would you be and why? I’d be a can-opener, because I think they’re really cool. I don’t know why, but they kind of fascinate me how they go around and cut it out . . . it’s so cool. [Laughs.] And I think Explo would kind of be one of those crazy bouncy balls with all those crazy angles that you get when you go to natural history museums or something and it’s supposed to be a rock ball, so you bounce it and it goes 40 different directions. It’s kind of clichéd, but Explo’s really multi-faceted. Like, there’s so many different aspects to it: there’s the main events, which are really fun . . . and there’s the classes which are fun but you really can learn a lot if you want to . . . and then there’s all the different people. It’s ridiculous how many different kinds of people there are. more conversations > first session \| second session