When I first heard about “Baruch Voices,” I became very excited. It was something I thought would be a lot of fun. To write a monologue, be chosen to do a storytelling workshop with professional improv theatre representatives, and then get to perform my own work on stage—how many times does a chance like that come around? So as soon as the monologue assignment was given in Freshmen Seminar, I began trying to figure out what I wanted to write about.
The theme in most of our classes this year has been identity, and our new journey of starting college. So I allowed that to become my inspiration. While brainstorming ideas, one of the topics that kept coming up was transformation, and as I felt as if I had gone through a pretty impactful one over the last year, I took on that topic as well. With this theme and topic in mind writing became very easy, though the one problem I had was I would write a sentence, then come up with multiple other ways to rephrase it. At first, it was going to sound like a motivational speech. Then the tone changed to more conversational. As I kept trying out different styles to see how each one sounded, I began to write in “fairytale terms” and, as Goldilocks would say, this style was just right.
I have always loved stories, especially fantasy and fairytales. However, though most of my favorites come out of the Disney vault, I’ve always felt as if the “happily ever after” was too much. While there is this excitement and fantastical element to it, the underlying subject of my monologue is self-discovery from transformative events. So I knew if I was going to go down this road, I would have to start after “the ever after” and just talk about the journey as a past event. Then I began, starting with one of the most iconic lines from a fairytale, “Mirror Mirror on the wall.” Writing the rest of my journey with these terms was surprisingly simple. As we have discussed in class, the old legends and tales all have similar plot structures and archetypal characters. Continue reading Christina Russo’s Thoughts on “Baruch Voices”