Word: westing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...floors are the clincher. Looking around Yadin Shemmer's apartment, I can handle the fax machine in the kitchen, the antique-looking toy cars, the huge red leather couch in the living room. But hardwood floors? In a spacious two-bedroom apartment, in a swanky building on the Upper West Side? A building with a doorman? For a 24-year...
...liked to listen to music but had no business playing it. Our teacher was a smart, enthusiastic 20-something with an unholy knowledge of pop music trivia and lyrics from musicals. Needless to say, we loved her. The highlight of the class was the week we watched "West Side Story" on videotape and discussed the musical's roots in Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet," the socially conscious message of the show and the Boston background of composer Leonard Bernstein...
...which made me especially sad that the administration of Amherst Regional High School in western Massachusetts decided to cancel a scheduled production of "West Side Story" after a group of concerned Puerto Rican students and parents submitted a petition saying that the musical promotes stereotypes and is racist...
Reaching back to my memories of ninth grade music history, this is what I learned about "West Side Story": it's a love story in which two teenagers, Tony and Maria, fall for each other against the backdrop of inner-city New York gang fighting. The musical's script, by Arthur Laurents, updates Shakespeare's tale of Capulets and Montagues by casting a gang of white New Yorkers against a gang of Puerto Rican immigrants...
Just as the point of "Romeo and Juliet" was to emphasize the power of love over the irrationality of rivalry and hate, "West Side Story" reminds us that issues of discrimination and injustice never go away. The portrayals of the gangs, white and Puerto Rican, are intended to illuminate the desperate situation of a life based on violence and discrimination along racial lines...