As part of my work with Teachers College Columbia University’s Media & Social Change Lab, we were asked to tackle the topic of Unique New York for the Spring 2023 Semester. In this episode, I discuss the relationship between New York City and the Broadway Musical (a long-lived passion of mine) and reflect on issues of accessibility and more.
Click “Read More” for the full transcript! You can also stream this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts!
What Cartoon Therapy Teaches Us About Mental Wellness
Did you know there’s a whole branch of therapy dedicated to healing people through books?
Bibliotherapy is a form of therapy that involves reading specific fictional works that talk about issues similar to those in your own life. You then discuss them with the therapist in order to help work through your own problems.
But as Western animation embraces more complex emotional themes, folks of all ages are relating to cartoons in a similar way. These works explore issues like grief, growing up, social justice, and even mental health in a way that’s layered, but still accessible and entertaining for a variety of audiences.
Cartoon Therapy, a scripted web series by popular Youtube creator Thomas Sanders, takes this to another level with a fictional therapist using cartoons to help his patients open up about their issues.
(SPOILERS for Avatar: The Last Airbender and Cartoon Therapy below)
Once upon a time, I wrote a letter to my younger self’s favorite Disney Princess: Snow White.
Originally, I wrote it on a whim, to deal with worries I was dwelling on at the time. Since then, it’s become one of my favorite pieces that I’ve written.
Despite being the foundation of the entire line of Disney Animated Movies, not to mention animated movies in general, Snow White, the film and the character, can be hard to love these days.
Since the film was already taking a risk on the animation, the plot and character development were incredibly simple. 80 years on, it’s very much a product of its time. I’ve heard people who just can’t stand the old animation or the princess’s high-pitched Betty Boop soprano.
Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/tom-margie/2063134998
Yet, the film and the character alike were a welcome escape in 1937 for people struggling with the Great Depression and the looming conflicts in Europe and Japan- a “tonic for disillusion,” as the New York Times called it. Some have even said The Wizard of Oz, which came out two years after Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, took significant inspiration from the Disney film.
More recently, seeing all the love around the 80th anniversary (December 21, 2017), from Saks Fifth Avenue Christmas windows to Funko Pop Figures, I feel I was wrong, when I wrote that letter, to think her the unfavorite of the Disney heroines.
Still, with plans for a live action remake in the works, I worry the best parts of her character and story will be lost in trying to make her appeal to a modern audience.
So, to celebrate, here again is why I see good and potential in this character:
Ghosts and ghost stories are one of the most pervasive frights in our culture. So in honor of Halloween, what life lessons can we learn from the dead?
If you know me, you know I don’t do horror. Like, at all.
The closest I’ve come to sitting through a horror movie was the film version of Sweeney Todd, and the only reason I got through that gore fest was the music of Stephen Sondheim.
Lee Pace gets me
I’ve never been into vampires or zombies. Werewolves I can do to an extent, if only because they’re fluffy and Remus Lupin is one. Witches I write about, but I prefer good witches to bad witches, taking the scare out of it.
But there is one creature of the night that has had a hold on my imagination for a long, long time:
Ghosts.
In the wake of Women’s History Month and various female-driven campaigns of the past months, inspiring women’s stories are getting great exposure. But despite present passion, if we don’t also look at stories of past failings in feminism (as documented in the play The Heidi Chronicles) and what it really means to be feminist, we may be doomed to failure.
In spite of all the misogyny and threatened rights present in government recently, I’ve been so inspired by the way women have come together in recent months. The Women’s March and associated marches that took place all over the world on January 21 may have come together quickly, but there was enough time for a grassroots marketing campaign to gain ground.
My favorite image associated with the marches is the one above by Narya Marcille, which my mom and I used as temporary profile pictures to support from afar.
What I love most is the variety of women it depicts. The way the Washington March was marketed by the women who originally put it together, they wanted it to be inclusive of more than one type of woman, or, as Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw coined it, “intersectional.” Seeing all those crowds on TV seemed to reflect what was depicted in that image. For a moment, I thought maybe the next four years could be okay if we all showed up like this.
But then… things started to come out. Things that, from my privileged perspective, hadn’t occurred to me could happen. Transgender women who were inadvertently isolated by the hats tying womanhood to biological sex over gender. Native American women who felt they were silenced from voicing the issues of land rights that affected them specifically. Black women who wondered if the women around them would be so willing to fight for racial equality as they were for sexual and gender equality. And for good reason – it was white women, who might not be so different from me, who voted 53% for the administration now endangering women’s rights.
My heart plummeted. Another disappointment in a long line of disappointments in recent months.
I mean, let’s acknowledge there were plenty of stories of inclusion in the marches as well, that the fact it spread among women, allied men, children, elderly, and even beyond United States borders is something to be celebrated, especially considering how relatively quickly it all came together. No movement is perfect. But as much as we want unity, we can’t silence these stories of women let down by current efforts, women of color or trans women or women with physical and mental issues. If we do, it will eventually destroy us.
Because we’ve seen this happen before.
In the weeks leading up to the 2016 election, a song began circulating on social media. Written by Sara Bareilles for the This American Life podcast, and sung by Hamilton‘s Leslie Odom Jr., the song “Seriously” imagined Barack Obama’s perspective on his time in office and the future of the presidency, the words he cannot say aloud.
There’s a certain lyric that leaps to mind:
Angry? Am I angry? You ask, am I angry? And I’m at a loss for words.
For the character of Barack Obama, a man noted for his thoughtfulness and his powers of speech, to be at a loss for words in the face of Donald Trump’s rise to power is tremendous, and terrible. And it isn’t a stretch to think the real Barack Obama often feels the same way about all that’s happening.
I certainly do.
Classic novels ingrained in Western culture have been adapted in many ways over years – plays, musicals, miniseries, films, modern teen novels, even text posts (no, really). In recent years, with the success of Game of Thrones, we’re seeing more and more books and series adapted to television format.
But one of my favorite methods of adaptation is one rarely discussed outside of internet culture: the literary web series.
These modern retellings of public domain works turn classic protagonists into Youtube vloggers, who let their story unfold before an audience. Literary web series have to be particularly inventive in bringing classic stories to modern day, organically integrating racial & gender diversity and modern sensibilities to works made over a hundred years ago.
Breaking down the structure of these series, there are five components to an effective adaptation:
Oh Lizzie Bennet Diaries, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
This webseries adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice took off in early 2012. It was the first of its kind – a scripted vlog series posing as a real blog series, taking the characters and situations from a literary classic and transplanting them to modern day.
So, if you know the story of Pride and Prejudice, the emotional plot of LBD follows a similar path of miscommunications, prejudices, and stubbornness, eventually leading to a happy conclusion.
A quick breakdown for those who don’t care about spoilers (last warning!):
Lizzie, a passionate 24-year-old grad student, sets out to document the life of herself, her cynical best friend Charlotte Lu, and her two sisters, beautiful and adorably sweet Jane, and wild party animal Lydia, as they fend off the matchmaking of their old-fashioned mother.
When single medical student Bing Lee comes to town with fashionista sister Caroline and stuffy friend William Darcy, Jane and Bing’s attraction leads to Lizzie having to deal with Darcy, whose initial impression of her being only “decent enough”… well… doesn’t give her the best impression of him.
Simultaneously, graduation is fast approaching, and swift changes in her life, from Charlotte and Jane moving away, to family financial and personal troubles, to the reveal of Darcy’s affections and true character, make Lizzie question her life and career choices.
In the end, Lizzie learns to see past her prejudices, appreciates her familial relationships, begins a relationship with Darcy, and makes the decision to start a business of her own after graduation.
I didn’t catch onto it until over midway through the run, but I quickly fell in love. When the companion novel The Secret Diary of Lizzie Bennet came out a year later, I downloaded the audiobook, voiced by the actress who played Lizzie in the original series, and felt like I was reliving the best of it all over again.
Additionally, I have discussed the series previously in comparison to Disney’s Frozen and in comparison to the film You’ve Got Mail, also inspired by Pride and Prejudice.
So, why do I love this series so much? And why is it relevant to getting a dream job?
As I go through the Startup Institute program, the one thing that comes up over and over again is that we all have unique backgrounds and skills that can be applied in the new career path we’ve chosen (in my case, marketing).
So here’s my story, career-wise:
I was in children’s publishing for a year, helping to publish books for ages 3-18. (Well, over a year if you count the NYU classes in publishing I took before that.)
I loved working on books for younger readers, as middle grade (audience ages 9-12) and some YA (young adult, ages 12-18) books were so formative for me in my childhood. Like not just Harry Potter, but also books ranging from the popular Percy Jackson series to the lesser-known Theatre Illuminata trilogy.
The thing is, I wasn’t in marketing. I wasn’t even in editorial, which is the most popular position in publishing. I was in managing editorial – the proofreading and formatting of the book, dealing with production materials. This is very behind-the-scenes, very unsung work, but all too necessary.
And because managing editorial is basically the hub connecting the editors and designers and marketers, I feel that, while I wasn’t in marketing directly, my publishing experience did teach me quite a bit about it.
So here are four things I learned from children’s books, and from working on them:
On Friday morning, my cohort at Startup Institute had a fireside chat with Aaron Nicholson, who is involved in the growing industry of virtual reality, or VR.
Now obviously, since this person was invested in the development of VR, he had a lot to say about the ways virtual reality can be used in gaming, film, health, psychology, and other such fields.
And, even having not experienced the Samsung virtual reality goggles that were passed around, I could see how this was intriguing technology, an extension of something we’ve tried to achieve for years with books, with film and games, 3-D Imax films, theme park rides – an immersive experience in another world.
And yet, there was a niggling in the back of my head – a scene from the novel Fahrenheit 451.
I first read Fahrenheit 451 nine years ago this month (which is SUCH a strange thought). I was away from home for the first time at a choral studies camp in middle-of-nowhere upstate New York, and it was required reading for school, which I figured I would get through while I was waiting for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows to be released.
The 1950s novel of a “near future” America where books are burned drew me in. I loved his wonderful and thoughtful language, the clear love of books spilled onto the page, the growth of rogue book burner Guy Montag, and the soul, wit, and heart of Clarisse McClellan.
What also stayed with me were the negative images, the worries and warnings science fiction often meditates on, especially in modern dystopias. The world of Fahreheit 451 is a lot closer to home than The Hunger Games or The Maze Runner, however, in that the society is quite recognizable. Robotic hounds, wall-sized TV screens, a tiny radio you can put in your ear – much of this tech is either close to existing or already there.
The scene I was thinking of, in this instance, had to do with the wall-sized television screens, called “parlor walls,” the intent being to eventually have enough money for four parlor walls, making the room an immersive TV parlor, which is what the main character’s wife, Mildred, wishes to do.
She calls the characters on her screens “family,” and even, at the top of the novel, participates in a play that comes on the “wall-to-wall circuit,” with the intent that one part is written out and Mildred can read a script and “interact” with the characters.
Are you starting to see why the concept of virtual reality made me think of this? Made me worry about this?
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