A Boy Like That - Anita from West Side Story

So we're just sittin' around in a circle listening to this speaker at college group one night, when she's like hey ok we're gonna do an activity now, and I'm like cool -- so everyone gets a cup with 5 different colored beans and 3 of each color. And the beans represent the different things we want in life like Success, Fame, Knowledge, Love, and Money. So we start trading, but the very first beans I lose are the pink ones... the ones that stand for LOVE.

_unrequitted LOVE is stupid.

And sometimes it makes me wonder, why isn't God's love enough?

Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac is about an ugly musketeer who you think is in love -- unrequitted -- with Roxanne, but as soon as he wins her heart, you realize that this musketeer is only in love -- with being in love.

But maybe the musketeer has fallen in love with "love" because he doesn't know what the real confirmation of true returned affection is.

I'm reading this book -- Searching for God Knows What by Donald Miller. And he's got this idea, that human emotions are inexplainable and untouchable save through art -- through human expression that cannot be recreated through any modern day science.

He's got this idea that most of the Old Testament [and its ideas] is written in poetic verse because poetry invokes emotion and --

"...that the ideas could not be presented accurately outside the emotions within which the truths were embedded."
-Donald Miller

In Berstein and Sondheim's musical West Side Story, Anita sings and shouts, "A Boy Like That," a desperate solo conveying all her pain and desperation and conflicting feelings about Maria's relationship with Bernardo's killer. And there I think there's just something about that number, something that stirs audiences that just wouldn't work the same way outside of music -- it wouldn't be the same as if Anita just told Maria how she felt, wouldn't be as potent -- there just something about poetry and music that conveys in whole the emotional pain and internal struggle for Anita to keep it together.


<sub>Fig 2. Jonny Stein jumping on top of me cuz we're fighting. Who jumps on top of someone like that during a fight?

Next: Still Searching for God Knows What.</sub>