I went to that lunch with one of the new potential profs yesterday and she got me thinking about a topic I don’t feel we talk about much as media studies majors – children and the media. She compared regular schools with Montessori and Waldorf schools (which severely limit if not totally eliminate) media in the classroom and said she much prefers the regular schools' system of media exposure. (Apparently, Waldorf schools even go so far as to prohibit the families of the children from owning a television!) The professor was definitely very against these policies. She said she would never send her child to a school like that because they go so against what she believes in. She felt that so much of children’s play stems from things children have seen on TV shows and in other media that it would be wrong to prohibit children from having access to movies, television, etc.

My parents dragged me out to see In the Continuum last Wednesday night, a play at the Kirk Douglas Theatre playing through Dec. 10. I didn’t want to go because it sounded depressing: two women, one in LA and the other in Zimbabwe, brought together by the fact they are both pregnant with HIV. I ended up going because the script was a hybrid of the two actresses’ separate plays, and I get a kick out of hybrid music/movies/plays lately.

The two-woman play stars and was written by Danai Gurira and Nikkole Salter while both studied as graduate students at NYU. I'm not sure, but I think each woman wrote her own lines, based solely on the fact that Salter was consistently funny and Gurira sometimes fell flat.