Colleen Hughes '04

Why can’t I ever manage to start a paper ahead of time? My first paper (of two) for my Pulitzer Prize Plays class is due Wednesday, and here I am, Monday night at almost 11:00, sitting here at my desk updating my blog instead of getting the paper done.

I’ve been so busy this past week. Memorial Day weekend was great—I got to visit my HC roommate again and ate way too much cookout food. Good times were had by all. Days off are a good thing. But then I had to head back to Somerville and read two August Wilson plays (Fences and The Piano Lesson) for Wednesday’s class. And then our make-up class for Monday’s holiday was on Friday, so I had to read Wendy Wasserstein’s The Heidi Chronicles for that class. I think that play has overall been the class’s least favorite out of what we’ve read so far (in addition to the ones I just mentioned and the ones I talked about in my previous entry, we’ve also read Neil Simon’s Lost in Yonkers).

I have a ton of work this week, so Friday night I made myself get work done and read Driving Miss Daisy (which I had no idea started off as a play). Then on Saturday I went to my aunt’s house because we were having a birthday party for my grandmother, who is 76. I brought my copy of Sunday in the Park with George, one of the few musicals to win the Pulitzer, with me and managed to read half of it despite all the younger cousins running around. I thought I’d have all day Sunday to work, but I ended up going to my cousin Will’s high school graduation that afternoon. It was very weird to think that it was ten whole years ago that I was the one who was graduating high school.

I got the rest of Sunday in the Park read last night. Did I mention how odd and difficult it is to read just the text of a musical, especially a Stephen Sondheim musical? Luckily, I had seen the taped performance of this show in a Dramatic Lit class in high school, and I had a general memory of the show and some of the songs, so it was much easier for me to read the play than it was for some of the other students in class who’d had no previous exposure to it. It’s a really cool play about the pointillist painter Georges Seurat and his work A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. Sondheim tried to reflect pointillism in the music too, so that, for example, the melody line is composed of different notes from different instruments rather than one continuous instrument, and the set and characters literally come together to form the painting by the end of Act 1.

Anyway. That was quite enough nerd-moment for one entry I think. And now I’m here, on Monday night, putting off writing my paper. We have to write about a play not on our syllabus by an author who is on the syllabus, so I’m doing Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love, which we read in class last semester but didn’t talk in depth about at all. We’ll be reading Shepard’s Buried Child for the last class of the semester. I’m going to be writing nonstop after work on Tuesday to get it done. I’ll miss the season finale of Glee and a Celtics game, but that is what DVR is for.