Drama High: Chapters 7-8

He points out the “quad” and the “field house” and refers to the “Ivies” and the “public Ivies,” where all these newbies will ultimately matriculate.

They just freeze until the noise subsides—what else are you going to do when your audience acts boorish?—then pick back up with the dialogue.

But she played the role of Cheryl Moody with such pitch-perfect subtlety that it was sometimes hard to discern improvements.

His father says Zach was outstanding, with one caveat.

I’m relieved when the scholarship decisions are announced later in the festival, and they are in accord with my observations.

Willfully inappropriate, she plays the tough-talking Levittown chick...

It sometimes seems to me there is a formula—about three compliments to one reproach—except that I know Volpe’s methods to be too instinctive for that.

They sound like prudes, which, considering their oeuvre at Truman, strikes me as more than a little ironic.

It is his idea to flood the whole area beyond the set in a blue light, which is a masterstroke—it will both make the stage look less vast and lend the production a foreboding moodiness.

It occurs after it has become clear that Brandon has ruined everything—brought shame to his family and school and sullied the reputation of a girl he doesn’t even know.

In the script, the dialogue is written with some exclamation points, but Bobby has stopped playing it with bombast.

But the courage displayed by Zach and Bobby is palpable.

The adulation seems to have an intoxicating effect on the usually grounded Wayne, sending him on an uncharacteristic flight of rhetorical fancy.

The adulation seems to have an intoxicating effect on the usually grounded Wayne, sending him on an uncharacteristic flight of rhetorical fancy.

But the living room did not convince Hansen that it belonged to “two accomplished and wealthy doctors,” nor did it reflect the “opulent lifestyle that produced the conflict within this family.”

Now, though, children in America’s privileged zip codes live at a higher altitude, their own airspace—a life of private lessons, tutoring, expensive SAT prep, summer internships rather than paid work, individual sports coaches to polish skills, college “coaches” to burnish résumés.

The landscape was a tableau of farm fields, barns, horses, cows, chickens, and the occasional house.

In a grandiloquent, newsreel-style voice, the show’s narrator, Westbrook Van Voorhis, began his report: “Today, at the eastern extremity of the state of Pennsylvania, a remarkable construction project is transforming the face of the countryside.”

In a grandiloquent, newsreel-style voice, the show’s narrator, Westbrook Van Voorhis, began his report: “Today, at the eastern extremity of the state of Pennsylvania, a remarkable construction project is transforming the face of the countryside.”

“Another day, another forty houses,” Van Voorhis intoned as one thirty-six-man crew, a fraction of Levitt’s massive army, posed in front of a finished house.

The narrator adds, in his sonorous tone, “No child remains lost in Levittown for very long.”

We slept upstairs in small rooms with dormer ceilings.

Thousands more found good-paying work at manufacturing plants with names redolent of an era of sweat and muscle—Vulcanized Rubber and Plastics, Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing, Rohm and Haas, General Motors.

I look back on that now and just marvel at the idea behind that admonition—that a person could earn so much cash from unskilled labor that he just might go blow it all on something stupid rather than put it down on a solid investment like a house.

The condition was congenital, present from the moment of conception.

And the racism was not benign; it was virulent.

And the racism was not benign; it was virulent.

Beginning with the night they moved in, the Myers family was subjected to terror, organized by an ad hoc group calling itself the Levittown Betterment Committee.

A state court issued an injunction, and the mob eventually dissipated.

Carl Grecco, the debate coach and a longtime history teacher, told me that he was assigned to be part of a team of teachers who were expected to run into the lunchroom to break up these imbroglios.

They started making steel in Levittown only as far back as 1952, but the reality and sentiment of Springsteen’s haunting requiem applies just the same.

The pool was so big that if the wind was right, a waft of chlorine hit you from a couple of blocks away, along with the din from the massive number of kids in the pool.

The Levittown Shop-a-Rama, site of the Kennedy campaign rally and touted as “the largest shopping mall east of the Mississippi,” was anchored by a Sears and another department store called Pomeroy’s.

Because of income inequality—the widening gap between rich and poor—large swaths of America that had once been solidly middle class no longer were.

They are the generation of working-class kids entering adulthood with heavy encumbrances.

A youngish guy with short-cropped black hair, Zuccarini has the affable, upbeat manner common to salesmen in any field.

It was bracing, like opening a door in a warm room in the dead of winter and getting a blast of arctic air.

In an open letter to township residents and policy makers, he criticized “idiosyncratic alternatives” to public districts, many of them “owned and operated by large national corporations whose number one mission is to enrich shareholders.”

I admire Lee for knowing exactly where he stands and stating it clearly, without jargon.

The whole district tends to be that way. Meat and potatoes. Light on lyricism and lofty credentials.