Dinosaurs and Dead People: A Boston Story

I’m doing a bit of travelling in the US. I spent the weekend in Boston with a few good friends, eating our way through the city and holding our potbellies off the ground. This is the essence of Boston:

Graveyards.

Sad trees.

Old people.

Dinosaurs.

How could I not like it?

We began the first day in the Boston Commons. The park was full of knobby, gnarled trees and shaggy willows. There were statues of famous American people like Paul Revere, riding his bronze horse. My friends and I came across the Freedom Trail at the far side of the park – a long, red line that weaves through Boston and connects the historical sights.

At least half of my pictures from Boston are of headstones in graveyards. I zigzagged through the Granary Burying Ground, the third oldest cemetery, noticing such Bostonians as John Hancock, Samuel Adams, and the victims of the Boston Massacre. The headstones were decorated with winged cherubs or winged skulls. One displayed a skull and crossbones, which caused me to suspect that I was on the grave of a landlocked pirate. The more famous people had piles of pennies tossed before their gravestones to spend in the slot machines of the afterlife.

            At the King’s Chapel, we found none of the ghosts that supposedly haunt the grounds, merely a well-stocked cemetery. The chapel’s burial ground is the oldest in Boston. Signs around the path requested that people stay off of the grass and refrain from “grave rubbing.” There are some strange people in Boston.

We could have gone to the meeting house where the Boston Tea Party was planned, but we were too hungry to be good Americans, so my fellow travelers and I headed to the North End. Veering off from the main street of Italian restaurants, we found small place called Dino’s. I had some tasty pumpkin tortellini, which I don’t recommend in combination with cranberry juice.

Later we found a place to sit by the ocean and calmly watched the passing nuns. I realized when I finally tried to stand up that I had unknowingly sat in melted ice cream and my pants were glued to the bench.

The next day I set off again in a different pair of pants. My companions stopped at Quincy Market for lunch where I adventurously ingested a Greek salad. For dessert, we went back to the North End to stop at Mike’s Pastry. All through Boston I observed people towing white Mike’s boxes all tied up with string containing wondrous confectionery mysteries.

The shop was predictably crowded and I ordered a Florentine cannoli that I saw from behind some taller people. Unlike the traditional cannoli, this one was covered in some sort of caramel, had the texture of peanut brittle, and came with a vial of insulin on the side. We nibbled our pastries outside of the Boston Museum of Science and required a great many napkins.

We had tickets for two shows at the Museum of Science. The first was an IMAX show about Australia, where we learned that kangaroos can freeze the growth of their embryos in times of drought and that shiny-eyed frogs can hibernate under gooey membranes for years on end. We watched a second show about collisions in space in the newly-renovated planetarium. The seats were remarkably comfortable and I found that it was the perfect place to take a much needed accidental nap.

We wandered through the exhibits, seeing tree-climbing snakes and dinosaur bones. The best exhibit was an infrared camera that showed your levels of body heat. We discovered that anything you touch temporarily turns a hot color and that my braid has a gradient. I decided that it is necessary for me to procure an infrared camera, which is entirely feasibly on a writer’s salary.

Before we returned home, my companions and I took a walk beside the Charles River and watched the sailboats and swans.

Post-Graduate Goals

Learn to drive an automobile
Find tolerable job
Ascend to Gandhi-like lifestyle in order to pay off loans
Finish novel and screenplay
Write autobiography of John Smith
Become herbalist
Become fluent in French
Become sort of okay at speaking Czech, but with admirable pronunciation
Learn to play accordion
Learn to upholster sofas
Learn to design cubist furniture
Finally read everything by Samuel Beckett and Jean Genet
Read something relatively complicated in French
Become talented vegetable gardener
Successfully cultivate carnivorous plant
Pickle something
Become successful Indian Food chef
Make new purse
Learn to alter hideous clothing into aesthetically pleasing clothing
Become temporary hermit
Go to grad school for Something
Travel to Quebec
Revisit Czech Republic
Go on adventures in Finland, Belgium, Poland, Romania, and any country once part of the former Yugoslavia

Mars Needs Drama

For my Playwriting class, I was supposed to use a New York Times article to make three ideas for plays. I found this article about Mars Needs Moms incredibly inspiring for this assignment.

Mars Needs Ideas – A Tragedy

Bob, Jack, and Steve, three filmmakers, sit together around a table on stage. While brainstorming and smoking cigars, they come up with a brilliant idea for a 3-D film about Martians kidnapping the mothers of ungrateful earthling children. The three filmmakers take turns fantasizing about all the money they will make and how they will spend it. They invest $175 million into making and marketing the film only for it to flop. Later, they sit around the same table wondering where they went wrong as the contents of their studio are carried away.

Mars Needs Film Producers – A Comedy

Three producers – Bob, Jack, and Steve – are kidnapped by a space ship full of Martians, transported to their home planet, and dropped into some sort of inescapable chromium zoo. They find that the creative team of The Adventures of Pluto Nash is already there. A little green Martian explains to Bob, in fumbling English, that Mars has a severe shortage of intergalactic family films. The three producers then smoke cigars around a chrome table and brainstorm the idea of Mars Needs Moms, inspired by the adventure that brought them to this strange and mysterious red planet in the first place. They spend $175 million Mars dollars making and marketing the film only for it to flop because of its socially insensitive depiction of Martians.

Mars Needs Film Producers – In 3-D!

A play that will be performed in… 3-D! The story will be the same one mentioned in the previous paragraph, but the audience will pay 30% more for the tickets.

Mars Needs Pixar Animators

The characters of Toy Story quietly watch a bootleg copy of Mars Needs Moms on Andy’s giant television. They feel sort of embarrassed and turn it off.

Mars Needs Action Romance

Bob and his two film-making friends are kidnapped and taken to Mars. They are dropped into some sort of chromium zoo where several slovenly Neanderthals with outdated filming equipment seem to have been stranded for years. Bob and his friends watch in horror as the hideous, green Martian faces gaze down from the space-glass above. Zafronia enters through steel doors and explains, in fumbling English, that the Martians want them to make an intergalactic family film. She has stylish hair and breasts which indicate that she is an attractive female Martian. Bob, Jack, and Steve desperately work together make a film, but it flops in the intergalactic markets. Conveniently, Zafronia has a warship and helps the filmmakers escape during the disastrous premier. She reveals to their surprise that she was just an Earth-Mom that was kidnapped and turned into a Martian. After blowing up Mars, they return to Earth and make the film Mars Needs Moms.

The Zemeckis Technique

Actors will perform Mars Needs Moms on a bare set wearing uniforms outfitted with sensors that record their movements. An avant-garde production for the whole family!

(Image credit: www.joeacevedo.com, home of the perfect Martian woman.)

Bohemian Paradise

            I was somehow pulled into a half-brained scheme to take a bus from Prague to a small town called Turnov in Cesky Raj—otherwise known as Bohemian Paradise. If it sounds like a song by Queen, it’s because it almost is. Full of castles on mountaintops, cottages, and apple orchards, this region of Northern Bohemia inspired many Czech fairy tales about gnomes.

            Mishaps that my friends and I endured on this adventure included missing our bus, riding the train one stop too far, and having to hike to the mountain before hiking up the mountain. We took a long walk through the vacant streets of a few small, rural villages. I found it eerie that each charming cottage with a garden and apple orchard was enclosed by a barbed wire fence.

Near the little train stop where we began our hike, the branches of an apple tree hung over the side of a fence. As some of my fellow hikers devoured the apples and declared them the best they had ever tasted, I recalled the story of Snow White, which could have very well taken place in Cesky Raj.

            Our destination was Trosky Castle, a stone ruin on top of a mountain. We could see the two stone towers in the distance as we trudged on. At the foot of the mountain my friends and I stopped with rumbling stomachs at a cottage with crates of apples and tomatoes at the gate. We said our dobry dens to the people in the yard and were soon joined by an old woman who spoke only Czech. We smiled as she explained the history of Cesky Raj in her native tongue.

She disappeared into her cottage and produced two guinea pigs. I was soon holding a quivering rodent called Kleopatra who seemed ready to wet the sleeve of my jacket in terror. The woman led us into her yard where she kept a caged bird that could imitate the sounds other animals. The Czech woman demonstrated the bird’s ability to bark and meow as I ineffectively tried to pass off the panicking piggy. “She not wants me,” I stuttered in Czech, and the woman smiled and told us that she had eight more guinea pigs in the house.

Once the guinea pigs were safely indoors we decided to get moving while the sun was still out. My friends and I purchased a few apples to thank her as we left and snacked on them as we started up the mountain. Our path was muddy and slippery from recent storms. When we looked back we could see villages and patches of fields beyond the trees.

            When we finally reached the ruins, we entered through the gate of a tall stone wall. Much of Trosky Castle was crumbling and propped up with scaffolding. We climbed up the winding stairs to the top of the highest tower, from which you could look down upon miles of Bohemian forests, fields, and clusters of villages below.

          We left the castle feeling exhausted and hungry. We took a different trail to the bottom, walking down the rural roads past bales of hay and gypsy caravans that seemed to go on forever.

My friends and I stopped at the first pub we found and were startled to find the interior to be a sort of museum of communism. Imagine an Applebee’s, only much smaller, and rather than pictures of celebrities and the retired jerseys of local sports teams cluttering the walls there are framed photos of Stalin and genuine hammer-and-sickle jerseys tacked up instead. The four locals at the other table seemed amused by our presence.

The owner of the pub only spoke Czech and Russian. We told him we were from New York and he nearly burst a blood vessel. He didn’t understand me when I ordered water, but went straight to the tap when everyone else ordered a pivo. In the Czech Republic you get some strange looks when you order water because the beer is cheaper. The only item on the menu that any of us recognized was smazeny syr—a flat, rectangular mozzarella stick that far surpasses its American cousin in flavor.

            We watched him cooking in the kitchen with the door wide open. The man brought us plates of fried cheese and boiled potatoes with a side of tartar sauce. He gave anyone who was finished another rectangle of fried cheese. My friend Emily and I received bananas because Women Need Potassium.

            After we finished our meals we had a train to catch, so my friends and I said na schled to the Stalin-themed pub and made a dash for the nearby train station. We returned to Prague, where no one was surprised by tourists and many people spoke English. In Turnov and the villages we visited, the people didn’t expect visitors and they didn’t understand why it was necessary for me to photograph the molding on their windows. I felt like I saw a glimpse of Czech life and not version that was adapted to suit American tourists.

Click here to see more photos.

A Series of Flashbacks

There are several adventures I had during last semester that never were written about, and I intend to correct this crime immediately. The posts that will follow do not indicate that I am still in Europe, for I am not. I am, in fact, merely reminiscing.

This is why I didn't get the job.

Dear Sir/Madam:

As an undergraduate student at Purchase College, I am grateful to have the opportunity to use my creative writing experience towards your startup website — grateful to be considered for any job at all. I believe that I am an ideal candidate to create content for your upstarting website with a loving and prematurely arthritic hand. I hope to engage you with my copies, thrill you with my copies of copies, and deconstruct the flimsy cardboard structure of “the box” which imprisons the thoughts of many.

Not only am I a mere semester away from being a proud owner of a tastefully framed degree, but I am currently the proud owner of SKILLS and EXPERIENCE. I recently volunteered as the English language proofreader for the Prague-based theological journal Communio Viatorum, for which I worked with theologians to preserve the meaning of their translated works. I successfully undertook this responsibility with no knowledge of theology beyond what a saw in the movie Angels and Demons. Last spring I interned as a Learning Assistant for an American history class and was required to design PowerPoint review sessions gripping enough to almost hold the attention of one hundred students who did not want to be there.

I voluntarily authored the script of the Purim Dragball Masquerade, the lovechild of the Purchase College chapter of Hillel and GLBTU. Two of my short stories have been included in Purchase College’s annual literary magazine Italics Mine. I am accomplished in using the tools made available through Blogger and my personal blog is consistently read by several people.

I hope you will keep me in mind when selecting “fun and creative interns” for your “self-maintaining database website.” Please consider reading the attached résumé and writing sample.

Regards,


Brittany Shutts

Movie Adaptations

After watching Easy A, I realized that my professional direction may be writing teen movies based on books we have all read in high school English class, a project that will challenge my storytelling skills and intellect and give meaning to my life. There may be no nobler task than the dumbing down of celebrated masterpieces for the culturally apathetic youth. I have since set myself to work, diluting beloved literary classics into hollow adolescent clichés.


The Great Gatsby

When Nick Carraway’s family moves to Long Island he discovers that he has a mysterious next door neighbor: Jay Gatsby. The wildest parties at West Egg High take place in Gatsby’s gothic mansion almost every night and his parents never seem to be home. His cheerleading cousin Daisy, her cheating quarterback boyfriend Tom, and her best friend Jordan Baker try to make Nick feel at home as he is sucked into a world of rich kids, crazy parties, and varsity sports. Nick’s relationship with Jordan blossoms as shocking secrets are revealed. What happened at summer camp between Jay and Daisy two years ago? Scandal and secrets unravel without the interference of social themes and symbolism in this gripping new adaptation of a classic story.


Jane Eyre

In Lowood High School, freshman Jane Eyre is the victim of bullies, snotty sisters, and evil principals. When she volunteers to tutor Adele, a glamorous French exchange student, things finally start to look up. Through Adele she meets Eddy Rochester, a silent and brooding senior football star who happens to be part of Adele’s host family. Adele gives Jane a Parisian fashion makeover, and Jane begins to attract Eddy’s attentions. Just when Jane begins to feel happy for the first time, she discovers that Eddy is secretly hiding his insane ex-girlfriend in his locker. Can their relationship survive in this clever adaptation which conveniently ignores the moral questions and Gothic elements of the original novel?


Julius Caesar

In spite of his epilepsy, sophomore Julius Caesar takes the varsity basketball world by storm. While the impressionable students of Rome High School think of Caesar as a hero, his teammates aren’t his biggest fans. Caesar has undermined the rest of the team in his rise to fame and lowered the former team captain Pompey to the ranks of the school mascot. Brutus, Caesar’s teammate and best friend, launches a plan to teach Caesar a lesson he won’t forget. Will Caesar learn what it means to be a team? And why does the janitor who waxes the gym floor keep repeating, “Beware the Ides of March?” The answer will surprise you in this fresh, athletic take on a Shakespearean tragedy that will teach us all a lesson in friendship.