Tuesday, March 06, 2007

Here comes Amy the Sparrow as LarryBoy the Cucumber!!

I pulled an all-nighter last night, working on a college paper. Well, I laid down for about an hour and half, but since I didn’t sleep a wink that doesn’t really count. Amazing thing is, I actually made it through the day and had a good one to boot!

During our second class of the day, we took a field trip to another classroom to see The Illumination Project--A social justice theater project. A group of students write and perform short skits that deal with experiences they have had regarding the current topic. This term’s topic is racial prejudice. The group acts out the skit of the day about a simple act of prejudice that could easily happen on campus, but with no resolution to it.

Then they perform the skit a second time. This time an audience member can call “stop!” and go take the place of on of the actors in an effort to help the situation. We audience members were not allowed to take the place of the main person being prejudice, but could step into any of the other roles. The point of the Illumination Project is both to help people become more aware of prejudice around them, but even more so, to give them practice taking affirmative action in a safe environment where they can experiment to see what works and what doesn’t, making us all more likely to step up next time we see something, instead of just fuming from the background.

And yes, I yelled stop and joined the action. I mean, hello, improv acting and defending someone wrongfully accused? If that doesn’t have Sparrow written all over it, I’m sure I don’t know what does!

OK, so on to LarryBoy. In ASL class at the moment our topic is animation (mainly to give us experience describing and interpreting any odd and unusual thing that might come along). So today we had to pick a famous animated character to describe. Tomorrow we’ll each take turns describing the physical characteristics of a character and then add a little action. Then our classmates guess who our character is!

I considered Buzz Lightyear, Woody, Sully or Mike Wazowski… But then I thought of LarryBoy!! It was someone unusual that was unlikely anyone else in class would pick, and does he have a great outfit or what! So yes, I’m highly pleased with who I picked. And shhh, don’t tell any of my classmates.

By the time I got to the end of the school day and was working on LarryBoy, it had been about 27 hours since I’d slept and I was flying high on adrenaline and decidedly giddy. Rather a fun state to be in when dealing with impersonating a cartoon character, but I knew I had a long drive home and would be crashing hard soon, so I left immediately after class instead of practicing and working on homework like usual.

Sure thing, I’m about beat. So I’m headed off to find a LarryBoy VeggieTale to refresh my memory with and then it’s off to an early bed for me! Singing out, from Sparrow the LarryBoy Impersonator!

1 comment:

purple_kangaroo said...

The skit sounds interesting!

We have a LarryBoy video or two if you want to borrow one.