Beyond the Palette

Dedicated to my beautiful husband Paul Lei.      Running fast along the road, I finally reached Gatsby’s house. As I dashed to his backyard, I noticed a blotch of dark red, slowly filling the crystal clear waters of his pool. Anxiously glancing towards the source of this disgusting sight, I saw Gatsby. "GATSBY!!! NOOOOO!! WHO DID THIS TO YOU!!!!" I screamed as I ran towards his lifeless body, drifiting around the pool like a lotus flower on a lake. Tears dripping off my cheeks, I was running over to his corpse when I felt the ground seemingly rumble, stopping me in my tracks. It was Gatsby. His body was vibrating hard, creating rough waves in the pool and knocking over plant pots nearby. "G-Gatsby? What's going o-" suddenly, Gatsby's body soared into the air, leaving a big green cloud behind. It turns out, he had a lot of gas pent up, waiting to be released, and when he died, his body wasn't able to hold it back anymore and unleashed the biggest, stinkie...

  Literature is often read, not performed. However this week in AP Language, we turned Chapter 7 of The Great Gatsby into a skit. Seeing the characters act out the scenes instead of reading words on a page transformed the story for me. Suddenly, Gatsby's desperation for Daisy wasn't just print on a page - it was shaking in someone's voice, or expressions that paint the picture of the scene. You see, acting is like p;ainting emotions, the same way an artist uses colors and textures to show sentiment within their artoworks. Would The Scream  be the same without it's unique artstyle and brushstrokes? Definitely not. The same way you can emphasize different parts of a painting with different colors and heavinesses, we can emphasize different scenes of a book through acting.  i think what stood out the most to me was how each group portrayed the same scenes in different ways. For example, our group was... well very unserious to say the least. We used modern slang and made o...

Take a look at the world around you. What do you see? From what I can guess, you'll see drywall, the screen on which you're reading this blog, and probably other things in your room too. All these things also have one attribute in common: they all have color!.. obviously. Of course, like I did just now, colors can be a descriptive attribute, but color isn't always just an adjective – it can also convey emotions. For instance, blue represents sorrow, red represents anger, yellow represents joy, etc. Even renowned artists take colors and the emotions they represent into consideration when creating pieces. Like in Vincent Van Gogh's The Starry Night, where the deep blue of the sky represents the tranquility and vastness of the night, while the yellow of the st ars and moon represents hope and divine energy.  Similarly , i n The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, colors serve the purpose of conveying emotions and traits of characters in hidden ways. For example, when Nick...