What a life changing experience this class was. I promise I’m not just saying that– my life was literally changed. As I mentioned in my last blog, I did not expect to have to watch, read, and experience what I have these last few months in my first semester of college. I did not expect to have the ability to write so informally in a blog (what a long way I’ve come), and nowadays I’m constantly looking around for a good picture to snap, even though the photo journal has come to an end. Mostly through the films and the shows that I’ve attended due to this class, my view of New York City has totally changed. Through Taxi Driver, I learned of how huge of a change New York City has gone through, something I had no clue had happened before. Through Wall Street I was shown how Wall Street can change people and even how different Wall Street is from any other place in the world. Through Do the Right Thing, I saw the continuous struggle of police brutality, which is still very evident in today’s society—I guess some things just never change. But what my favorite work was Birds with Sky Mirrors. It was my favorite because I never thought I could hate something so much. How does that make sense? It’ll all make sense in a second. My life experiences made my reaction the way it was. Just like in my first blog, I wrote about how Art is an Experience, and how every person views art in a unique way because each person has unique experiences. Without the experiences that I’ve went through, I may still have hated Birds with Sky Mirrors, but I probably wouldn’t be writing about how it was my “favorite”.

So watching Birds with Sky Mirrors, I had many thoughts and emotions going through my mind. I started off annoyed at the horrible choice of music, I went through a phase of hysteria when the naked women started screaming (I had to hold Elizabeth very tightly in order for the woman giving out the programs not to yell at me for cracking up) and then I was very pensive the rest of the performance. Why was G-d putting me through this? As the seconds ticked on my watch, I was growing more and more annoyed and soon enough I believed I was going through a form of torture. My experiences made me believe that every situation I’m in, I’m in for a reason, and I sat there thinking what the reason for this situation was. Did I do something horribly wrong that I needed to atone for a sin? Maybe. That was the thought for a while, and I sat there for a few minutes thinking about all the things I’ve done wrong in my life. But then I looked at all of the performers and thought to myself: New York City would have a performance like this.

I realized that all of the people around me, myself included, were in this City and were living and breathing away the days of our lives, trying to become someone… something. I don’t really live dangerously; I go to school in hopes of being a Speech Pathologist one day. My friends on either side of me are in school to become something else. Who knows where half of us will end up? But what I did know at that moment was that those performers were up there and New York City gave them the opportunity to be there. New York City gave them the chance to make this a “work of art”. Yea, I may totally and completely not understand why anyone would even pay a dime or spend their precious time here on this Earth to watch this performance, let alone perform in it, but what I do or don’t understand really doesn’t change much, and as much as I hated this performance, it really did have an impact on me, whether I like it or not. What I watched when I saw Birds with Sky Mirrors may not have been a version of my “truth”, but the fact that it even exists and is considered a work of art screams New York City to me. New York City is the only place I know that encourages and supports such “crazy” things! But although its crazy to me, I know that its also the place that encourages and supports the things that are important to me and that’s all that I really need. Birds with Sky Mirrors made me see New York City for what it really is: the city of opportunities (no matter how weird or boring those opportunity may be!).