Shakespeare starring Amanda Bynes?

In my first three years of high school, I was taught to look beneath the surface. We as humans should look beneath the surface of everything and everyone, whether it is a performance or just a person in general. In the first chapter of “How to Read Literature like a Professor” Foster talks about how many people skip over what is most important. I catch myself in different situations always questioning “What does that signify?” Whether or not I can figure it out is another story, but hopefully with the help of Thomas C. Foster and his ‘Lively and entertaining Guide to Reading between the Lines’ it will become easier for me.

One of my favorite movies “She’s the Man” starring pre-2013 Amanda Bynes, that falls into the category of ‘Stupid movies that should not be movies” it focuses on a teenage girl named Viola Hastings who enters her brother, Sebastian Hastings’, school in place of him, pretending to be male, in order to play with the boys’ soccer team. Sound familiar? Well if my movie summary skills aren’t up to par with how they should be sorry, but this movie is actually based on William Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night”. Although my nine year old self didn’t realize this while watching it in theaters my dad, an advocate for the arts and a senior literature teacher sure as heck wasn’t going to let me out of that theater scot-free without a lesson on the symbolism of everything in the movie to the play. It was then that I first realized that everything is deeper than it seems.

Currently I am at a summer intensive at the San Francisco Conservatory of Dance and I was able to attend one of their performances earlier this week. One of the pieces entitled “Collisions” really stuck out to me. The dance featured three dancers whom one by one danced a solo and at the end came together and danced simultaneously. What stuck out to me was not the dancing (although it was phenomenal) and Cello Suite No. 1 in G major is one of my favorites but it wasn’t the music either. It was the voice in which was being played while the dancers danced and the music was played. The voice was the choreographer’s voice who was reading off different commands such as “you’re fine”, “it’s okay”, “keep going”, “don’t stop”, “that was good”. As the commands were repeated I thought about each of them and realized that those are commands that as a dancer you are told more than anything. I was fortunate enough to be able to talk to the choreographer’s sister, who is one of my peers at this intensive and she told me that the piece was inspired by her sister’s old dance studio and how they pushed her to be more and how she never felt good enough in that type of environment. She would collide with her fears of not being good enough with the commands being tossed at her hence the title. Now I know what you’re thinking, “What does this have to do with the book?” and I can honestly say I’m not 100 percent sure, but what I was trying to get across is how not just in books, Mr. Foster, do we need to read between the lines but in everyday occurrences as well. In conclusion I state that I do agree with what Foster says in the first chapter, in which we should not be as dense as we are made out to be.